Portrait of a lady, a stylish lady
CDG
48˚ 51’ 32” N | 2˚ 17’ 40” E
CDGE13290*
The Eiffel Tower seen from the Right Bank on Esplanade du Trocadéro in Paris’ 16th arrondissement. The Eiffel Tower is in the 7th arrondissement. The gold statues date from the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. © Vast Compass, 2025.
Style, sophistication, and glamour
In her excellent book, The Essence of Style, Joan DeJean details, “How the French invented high fashion, fine food, chic cafes, style, sophistication, and glamour.”
It’s an excellent read. Taken in total the book’s 13 chapters explain the very real phenomenon of France’s ‘superiority complex’. They also make clear there is one man from whom countless elements of French style originate: King Louis XIV who reigned from 1643 until his death in 1715. Even the briefest snapshot of innovations in architecture, fashion, and culture during the Sun King’s reign of 72 years and 110 days makes the point.
By command of the King in 1667 Paris was illuminated at night by thousands of streetlamps. The City of Light was born, and a new word was coined: nightlife.
For centuries European royalty coveted pearls above all other baubles. Then in 1669 Louis XIV bought the Hope Diamond. By the time of his death in 1715 the Sun King had amassed a collection of nearly 6,000 diamonds, equivalent to the value of 9,000 pounds of solid gold.
In 1670 Dom Pérignon champagne became the beverage of courtly elegance and sophistication.
The world’s first full-length mirrors were installed in Versailles in 1682. We’ve been gazing at ourselves ever since.
By the 1690s trendsetters were avidly copying the King’s footwear, namely mules with their sexy heels and bows of satin.
In tandem, the first shop offering coffee and pastries opened in Paris in 1675, and café society was born. A recipe for crème brûlée was published for the first time in 1691—it’s the most frequently ordered dessert in top restaurants today. Joining these developments were indoor shopping in elegant boutiques, hair salons overseen by stylists commanding fees as high as their creations, and the practice of organizing wardrobes according to seasonal styles dictated by the fashion press.
CDGE13069*—A portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud, commemorating the Sun King’s visit to Château de Chenonceau on July 14, 1650 (of course, from 1789 onward, le 14 juillet would have deep meaning for the nation). The painting’s astonishing frame is sculpted from just four pieces of wood.
CDGE10008*—Until 1672 the world’s highest quality mirrors—and the largest, at twenty-eight inches high—came from secretive Italian workshops, which is why the French King was spending $1 million annually on silvered glass. But within a decade Louis had provisioned better quality, and larger mirrors from French workshops at a cost of $33 million to create his nonpareil ‘Galerie des Glaces’ (Hall of Mirrors), the stunning showpiece of Château de Versailles.
CDGE13173*—Café society began during the reign of the Sun King. Today foodies follow in the footsteps of famed Parisians like Picasso who favored La Rotonde.
CDGE13217*—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously smoked the existential day away at Café de Flor or Brasserie Lipp.
CDGE11052*—”Since 1880, Lipp has welcomed you every day, serving classic French dishes with elegance and conviviality.”
CDGE240*—The Galeries Lafayette Coupole is among the world’s most beautiful leadlight installations. The stained-glass dome arcs across 3,200 square feet, crowning a multi-story rotunda with views from each tier of bespoke retail. Inspired by a 10-petal flower, the glass cupola delivers a diffuse light throughout the Galeries Lafayette Paris Haussmann department store, and endures as a premier example of Art nouveau, or Art Déco architecture.
CDGE13418*—The Printemps Haussmann department store features its own take on a leadlight dome. 65 feet in diameter, it rises 52 feet in aqueous shades of peacock feathers and sunlight, making Le Printemps yet one more stunning example of indoor shopping, a concept first experienced during the reign of Louis XIV. Until then, shopping was an outdoors affairs, taking place on sidewalk tables or through ‘holes in the wall’.
PVDE24062*—Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island was built by William Vanderbilt as a 39th birthday present for his wife, Alva, at a cost equivalent to $400 million in today’s currency. The dining room is redolent of the Sun King’s reign, with gilt touches everywhere. The Louis XIV-inspired chairs weigh 75 pounds each, requiring assistance to be seated and to rise after dining.
CDGE15006*—At the end of the dining room is a replica of a fireplace from Versailles’ Salon d’Hercule. Alva was the first of Newport of society’s grande dames to offer service à la française, meaning meals with all courses presented at a go, like family style meals today. It replaced service à la russe, in which courses were presented in a series by attendant waiters.
La dame de fer
With the elements of style so deeply rooted in the idea of France, it seems pre-destined that Gustave Eiffel’s iron creation would take its place as one more entry in a record of sophistication going back centuries. On that front, La dame de fer (the Iron Lady) does not disappoint. With her elegant profile sweeping upward, her margins ornamented with lacework and forged furbelows, her bodice and skirt glowing and shimmering in darkness—she’s the loveliest lady at the ball, a chic declaration of timeless design daring us to look away. In 1955 Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier contributed to a book, La Tour Eiffel.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson (and others) used Eiffel’s curtain wall construction concept from the Statue of Liberty in constructing New York City’s Seagram Building. The exterior system uses prefab components of steel and glass, is lightweight, and is non-load-bearing, even as it provides aesthetic benefits and protection against the elements. Photo credit: Pablo Fernandez Villoch, iStock.
Another curtain wall skyscraper of note? Yep. Tour Montparnasse, shown above far left, where this blog series discovering a thousand stories just out of frame from the Eiffel Tower began. Small world, isn’t it? Photo credit: zxvisual, iStock.
A race to pierce the sky
Curtain-wall construction means the structure we see—the façade, or wall—isn’t loadbearing. Rather, it’s attached to a supporting framework which does all the work. Gustave’s Eiffel’s innovation in wrought iron construction for the Statue of Liberty led to a new architecture. And while the Eiffel Tower is not a curtain-wall structure, within just a few decades of the 1889 world’s fair, the Chrysler Building used the architectural principle to become the tallest building in the world. Mere months later the Empire State Building leapfrogged it, and ever since the race to pierce the sky ever higher has been on.
NYCE13001*—Pre-fabricated components meant the Empire State building could be built at an astonishing rate, averaging 4.5 floors per week.
NYCE07002*—The project came in ahead of schedule by more than a third ($24.7 million vs. a projected $43 million).
NYCE13002*—Like the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building is lit in colors celebrating calendared events, sports teams, and cultures. Shown here, July 4, 2013, as seen from Gaonnuri, a penthouse Korean BBQ restaurant.
By the numbers
Like every architectural achievement, the story of the Eiffel Tower isn’t complete without a profile of its numbers—the metrics which codify the accomplishment we can easily grok at a glance.
CDGE10032—The tower’s original height was 1,024 feet, without transmission towers. (With today’s profusion of electronic signal transmitters its height increases to 1,083 feet.)
CDGE07027—Designed to withstand strong gusts the tower can sway up to 2-3 inches in extreme winds. In retirement Gustave Eiffel continued to pursue his passions of meteorology and wind dynamics.
CDGE13302*—It takes approximately 60 tons of paint to coat the entire tower. All in, the monument tips the scale at 10,100 tons, 7,300 of which are of metal.
CDGE07066*—A bronze sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle
of civil engineer Gustave Eiffel, 1832-1923, rests on a stone plinth near the tower's north pillar.
CDGE07026*—The tower can be up to seven inches taller in the summer due to heat expansion. The central spire of Lincoln Cathedral, at 525 feet, surpassed the Great Pyramid in 1311. The Eiffel Tower took the crown for highest man-made structure in 1889.
CDGE13294*—The tower was originally reddish-brown. In 1968 the livery was changed to ‘Eiffel Tower Brown’.
CDGE07028*—The names of 72 prominent French scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are inscribed on the tower in a band above the monuments four archways. Left to right, above: Jacques-Joseph Ébelmen, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Louis Poinsot, Léon Foucault, Charles-Eugène Delaunay, and Arthur Jules Morin. The names were originally painted gold.
CDGE10033—For 41 years, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world. In 1930 the honor went to the Chrysler Building in New York City at 1,046 feet. The record stood for less than a year when the Empire State Building claimed the title at 1,250 feet.
CDGE13295*—As of 2025 the tower has been re-painted 20 times, averaging about 7 years between each round of maintenance (the paint isn’t aesthetic so much as it’s a protectant to keep the iron monument from rusting).
CDGE13313—To compensate for atmospheric haze, 3 shades of paint are used to make the tower appear uniform in color.
CDGE13307*—The Tower’s 4 filigreed arches are decorative, providing no structural support.
The price of fame
Achievements like the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Brooklyn Bridge were known worldwide. For millennia ‘architecture’ largely was for kings, emperors, and popes. Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, all but the Great Pyramid in Giza were lost to time. So as new ‘wonders of the world’ began to rise in late 19th century, headlines, illustrations, and new-fangled photography conspired to make these new structures famous.
Cue the swindlers, fraudsters, and grifters.
Recommended
From Simon & Schuster
”What makes fashionistas willing to pay a small fortune for a particular designer accessory? Why does a special occasion only become really special when a champagne cork pops? Why are diamonds the status symbol gemstone, instantly signifying wealth, power, and even emotional commitment?
Writing with great élan, one of the foremost authorities on seventeenth-century French culture provides the answer to these and other fascinating questions in her account of how, at one glittering moment in history, the French under Louis XIV set the standards of sophistication, style, and glamour that still rule our lives today. Joan DeJean takes us back to the birth of haute cuisine, the first appearance of celebrity hairdressers, chic cafés, nightlife, and fashion in elegant dress that extended well beyond the limited confines of court circles. And Paris was the magical center -- the destination of travelers all across Europe.
Full of wit, dash, and verve, The Essence of Style will delight fans of history and everybody who wonders about the elusive definition of good taste.”
The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour
From Amazon
“An exploration of how French culture during the reign of Louis XIV has had an enduring influence on modern traditions and style cites the French origins of such practices as haute cuisine, interior design, and the consumption of celebratory champagne.”