"This is the book based on the hugely successful exhibition Fashions of the Hapsburg Era: Austria-Hungary, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 1979 through August 1980. The show presented more than 150 costumes, uniforms, and military and equestrian trappings dating from the eighteenth century in Austria and Hungary to the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918. But at the heart of the exhibition were the costumes and liveries worn at court in the late nineteenth century, during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth—one of the most highly romantic periods in European history ... Each essay is lavishly illustrated in color and black and white, with eighteen specially commissioned color plates of costumes and accouterments in the exhibition. A detailed chronology of the years between 1699 and 1918 and a selected bibliography are included"--Metropolitan Museum of Art website, viewed May 16, 2022.

"The fashions worn during the Hapsburg era in Vienna and Budapest had their own kind of uniqueness. This is not to say that well-dressed Austrians and Hungarians of the periods covered in the exhibition were out of touch with what was considered fashionable to the rest of the Western world. On the contrary, the upper-class Austrian and Hungarian ladies were well aware of the latest French fashions. The gentlemen, too, were very much in tune with the sartorial modes of the French in the eighteenth century, and later, in the nineteenth century, they turned to the English styles, with their accent on elegance and superb tailoring. What was it, then, that made their fashions unique? It is important first to note that although the Hungarians were tied to the Austrian Hapsburg Empire in one way to another from 1699 until World War I, they remained culturally apart. The Austrians leaned both politically and ethnically toward the West. For centuries the Hapsburgs, through intermarriage and wars, were linked to many of the major courts of Europe. Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, and Marie-Louise, the second wife of Napoleon I, were both Austrians. The Hungarians, on the other hand, besieged by the Huns in the ninth century, occupied by the Mongols from 1241 to 1242, and conquered by the Turks between 1541 and 1683, developed a distinct taste for oriental styles"--Publisher's description