With the French Revolution, the heavily boned and full-skirted silhouettes of traditional aristocratic attire gave way to the ideological preference for what the Revolutionaries took to be the form and substance of classical dress. During the Directoire and the Napoleonic Empire periods, sheer Neoclassical styles based on high-waisted "Grecian" dress became the vogue. In this portrait, Madame Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's embrace of the antique is reflected in both her gown and the décor. Fashions of the period are known for their disclosure of the natural body. But while the stiffly boned corsets of the preceding ancien régime disappeared, a lighter version evolved that was more cylindrical than the inverted cone shape of its predecessors. The new, more supple corsets commonly controlled the body through stiffened corded lines of quilting and the insertion of a center-front busk, a stiff stay of wood, metal, or whalebone. But the single transformation of the silhouette that has most come to characterize the fashions of the period was the raising of the waistline to directly below the bust. This portrait includes an additional classicizing detail: the draped fastening at the cap of the dress' oversleeve is an allusion to the button closures at the shoulderlines of the chiton.

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