What if we viewed 17th-century aesthetics not as static ornament but as dynamic sites of gendered meaning? My upcoming book, Designing Women: The Iconography of Charles Perrault , begins with this question. Chapter One uncovers how design—visual, poetic, and rhetorical—shaped ideas of sex, power, and perfection in the court culture of Louis XIV. Perrault, long celebrated as the father of the literary fairy tale, emerges here in a different light: as a court designer whose poe