But actually, it didn’t. Months later, in May, Hilton hosted a final bash at London’s iconic Stork Rooms, arriving in what became one of the most defining looks of the early 2000s: a backless Julien McDonald chain-mail mini dress and rhinestone choker. This was the night that produced the now-legendary Paris Hilton glitterati shot—the one that would live on in endless best party dresses lists.
Hilton was no longer on the club scene: She was the main event. That’s hot.
In her memoir, Hilton herself calls her party tour “possibly the greatest twenty-first birthday celebration since Marie Antoinette.” She didn’t know it then, but in just a few years—like Marie Antoinette before her—Hilton, too, would go from “It girl” to scapegoat.
Even as a frightened, 14-year-old child bride shipped off from Austria to marry a stranger, Marie Antoinette always had that je ne sais quoi. Though she came from enemy turf, the French court was instantly charmed by her beauty, style, and grace. Beyond Versailles, the public also adored her at first, seeing its future queen as a symbol of renewal, even rebirth, during the messy final years of the reign of Louis XV, best known for his (many) sex scandals, corrupt mistresses, and humiliating military defeats. In her book Marie Antoinette: The Journey—which served as the basis for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst—Antonia Fraser wrote that children “offered her baskets of flowers, and the daughters of the bourgeoisie, in their best clothes, strewed further flowers in her path.”
As a young dauphine (wife to the heir apparent), nearly every aspect of Marie Antoinette’s palace life was informed by ceremony and performed for an audience. She ate, dressed, prayed, bathed, and later even gave birth in front of a crowd. A memorable scene in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette begins just after the title character has been roused awake by a swarm of ladies-in-waiting. Dunst shivers half-naked, desperate to get dressed, as one lady after another barges in, each ranking higher than the last entitled to present the queen’s garment—grinding the already painstaking Cérémonie du Lever (or rising ceremony) to a halt, all in the name of etiquette. The scene ends with Dunst muttering, “This is ridiculous.” In daily life, too, there were rules for everything—who could stand near the dauphine; who could speak, sit, or even breathe in her presence. Versailles was a cage, and Marie Antoinette was trapped inside.
