Marie Antoinette's Macaroons Color Palettes

Qu'ils mangent de la brioche

I

n 2006, was born the Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, starred by Kirsten Dunst.

I have already a  Marie Antoinette's palette in this blog inspired by the film.

But I watched the movie again and fell in love with the pastel colors of the dresses, the pastries and the coloring of the film.

So I made some research and I found Eleanor Coppola's "The Making of 'Marie Antoinette", a short documentary about the film backstage and some of the Sofia Coppola's ideas of the production. 

Danny Houston, the actor says the movie is: "...sexy candy." It is refering the idea of the superficiality of the period, because he thinks the film is deep, but he was refering to the colors or representation of a fluffy period.

He also refers a quote from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray :

 “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....”

 

 

At the blog Documenting Fashion A Dress History Blog, they state that:

"With Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), Canonero won her third Oscar, after Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975) and Chariots of Fire (Hudson, 1981). In the colours and textures employed, the fashion at the cinematic Versailles looks like the desserts in which the queen is seen indulging in multiple scenes. In fact, Canonero was inspired by a box of Ladurée macarons received by Coppola as a gift. The colour palette, then, was mainly constituted by pastel hues, with one significant exception: Madame Du Barry..."

They refer to Milena Canonero, the Italian Costume Designer, four times winner of Oscars.

Also cited in the blog Women and Fashion in Film, quoting the The London Times Magazine: 

“At the start of pre-production, Coppola handed Canonero a box of pastel-coloured macaroons from the Laduree pastry house. “She told me, ‘These are the colours I love’,” recalls Canonero.“I used them as a palette. Sofia was clear about the colouration, but left the rest to me. We squeezed the essence of the period, without reproducing it. Even if you think you know a lot about it,” she argues, “you always have to look for a new angle. I simplified the very heavy look of the 18th century. I wanted it to be  believable, but more stylized.”

 

 There is also a video about the costumes in the movie: Marie Antoinette Costume.

In the end, macaroons were the key of the film colors.

So, I got three pictures of macaroons and created 29 different palettes taking as base only two Blues, six Greens, seven Pinks, seven Violets, five Yellows, one Orange, one Red.

I hope you'll like them.

Behind the Scenes

1.- Font in use: Rather Risque by SilverStag.
2. Download the color palettes in different formats (Color Schemer Studio, SVG, Expression Design Swatch, WPF Resource Dictionary, Silverlight XAML, Adobe Swatch Exchange, ACO, AI, GPL, HTML or everything in a zip file), at Colourlovers 

Download PDF

3.- Or download everything in a zip file:

Download