Danny Houston, the actor says the movie is: "...sexy candy." It is refering the idea of the superficiality of the period, because he thinks the film is deep, but he was refering to the colors or representation of a fluffy period.
He also refers a quote from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray :
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....”
"With Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), Canonero won her third Oscar, after Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975) and Chariots of Fire (Hudson, 1981). In the colours and textures employed, the fashion at the cinematic Versailles looks like the desserts in which the queen is seen indulging in multiple scenes. In fact, Canonero was inspired by a box of Ladurée macarons received by Coppola as a gift. The colour palette, then, was mainly constituted by pastel hues, with one significant exception: Madame Du Barry..."
They refer to Milena Canonero, the Italian Costume Designer, fourth times winner of Oscars.
“At the start of pre-production, Coppola handed Canonero a box of pastel-coloured macaroons from the Laduree pastry house. “She told me, ‘These are the colours I love’,” recalls Canonero.“I used them as a palette. Sofia was clear about the colouration, but left the rest to me. We squeezed the essence of the period, without reproducing it. Even if you think you know a lot about it,” she argues, “you always have to look for a new angle. I simplified the very heavy look of the 18th century. I wanted it to be believable, but more stylized.”
In the end, macaroons were the key of the film colors.
So, I got three pictures of macaroons and created 29 different palettes taking as base only two Blues, six Greens, seven Pinks, seven Violets, five Yellows, one Orange, one Red.
I hope you'll like them.
Behind the Scenes
1.- Font in use: Rather Risque by SilverStag. 2. Download the color palettes in different formats (Color Schemer Studio, SVG, Expression Design Swatch, WPF Resource Dictionary, Silverlight XAML, Adobe Swatch Exchange, ACO, AI, GPL, HTML or everything in a zip file), at Colourlovers