Beads and embellishments were perhaps mankind’s first indulgent luxury…
26th Costume Designers Guild Awards Winners
Napoleon was an outsider who rose to heights of authority to rival any world ruler. The Corsican soldier maneuvered through the muck of some of history’s bloodiest battlefields and most powerful royal courts, using charisma and the cult of celebrity to his advantage in both arenas. When Bonaparte donned the velvet, ermine-trimmed mantle and crowned himself Emperor of France—an image captured in the dazzling Jacques-Louis David painting in the Louvre—he reached a pinnacle of glory beyond the wildest imagination of anyone except, perhaps, himself. It would be all downhill from there.