definition: name for the French fop or dandy of the period of the Directory (1795-99). Said to be so called from their extravagant dress or from a favorite expression among them (“C’est vraiment incroyable”). Their fashion was scandalous, they wore enormous hats, no corsets and their female counterparts, the merveilleuses, showed more skin than usual. The incroyables, dandies of the period, favored tight breeches and coats with wide lapels.

source: Online Etymological Dictionary & The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition (2004)

The phenomenon of the incroyables inherited the stereotype of the muscadin, which, in the observational vocabulary of 1793–94, had been cast as the adversarial antithesis of the sans-culotte. Now, actively dressing up rather than down signalled an uninhibited liberation from and non-compliance with the residual post-Thermidorian republican ethos. After Thermidor, the jeunesse dorée, a militant and aggressive form of updated muscadin, publicized their repudiation of the republican state through their assaults on ex-Jacobins, and also by their evasion of conscription. Mercier defined these latter-day muscadins as ‘rich and effeminate, wanting to distinguish themselves from those they called the bluecoats’ – soldiers - which they did by feigning physical incapacity, and thus avoiding conscription. In this, however, they were acting against the grain, in that society was becoming increasingly visibly militarized. The officially sanctioned and elaborately codified diversity of uniforms consequent upon the expansion of the army competed with, if not overshadowed, civilian fashion. Indeed, from the growth of the initially ill-equipped and eclectically dressed revolutionary army to the massed regiments of the Empire, uniform was to take over the role incompletely played by official dress as a signifier of social order. The ubiquitous social presence of military uniform inscribed a renewed recognition of hierarchy, shifted into a form of notionally apolitical appearances (notwithstanding the events of 18 brumaire).

Quelle: Richard Wrigley: The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France. New York: Berg, 2002: 265f.

The end of the terror, with its popular and puritan austerities, was also marked by a revolution in dress. The exaggerated fashions of incroyables and merveilleuses were the visible sign of the birth of a new society, with men in badlycut coats, padded shoulders, high collars, immense cravats and admiral’s hats, and its women half-naked in pseudoclassical robes, gathered up in the high-breasted directoire style and falling in long diaphanous folds to the Grecian sandals. An affected ‘de-boned’ speech, leaving out the consonants, was adopted by the jeunesse dorée.

Quelle: Alfred Cobban: A History of Modern France Vol. 1. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books.