This is John Batchel, a conversation with Professor Anne Higone.

Her new book, Liberty, Equality, Fashion, the women who styled the French Revolution.

One was named Terezia, another was named Juliet, and the third, sometimes called Josephine, wife of Bonaparte.

The revelation was in painting, in dress, and in material.

Here the professor introduces us to muslin, very, very refined muslin,

that freed women's bodies after the generations of corsets and whalebone and constriction to move in a room

gracefully and to be painted in that muslin dress by the Napoleonic period.

Here's Professor Anne Higone on muslin. Much more of this tomorrow night.

The painters were fascinated. You're absolutely right by the combination of the new appearance of the fabric

and the way in which it allowed women's bodies to be so much more visible than they had ever been before.

It was as if people suddenly discovered that women had legs or that women could move.

That magical glow like mist of the white dresses they wore came from the supreme quality of

cotton, which the most fashionable women tried to obtain.

It was a very diaphanously thin kind of cotton called muslin,

which had begun to be worn by the Mughal emperors as an alternative to silk. They had the

idea in India to make cotton imperial. And then in Europe, it was our three

fashion celebrities who brought that idea to the four.