“I heard people say she looks so beautiful and peaceful like she’s sleeping,” Ms. Upshaw said. “She’s a fashion icon! What else would we expect?”

Ms. Upshaw noted that Ms. Franklin’s crimson outfit on Tuesday had been a nod to her honorary membership in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, “which is perfect,” Ms. Upshaw said, “because her sorority sisters came that night to pay her final respects.”

It was not only the elaborate beauty of Ms. Franklin’s outfits that were a nod to another era. Bess Lovejoy, the author of “Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses,” said that the procession that attended her funeral, with its motorcade of pink Cadillacs, reminded her of nothing so much as the burial of Alexander the Great. Alexander, she said, had the prototypical celebrity funeral, with a glittering hearse that was meant to resemble a palace.

“There were years and years of dignitaries coming to see him, even though he would not be preserved with the skill that Aretha was,” she said. “There’s a story about Julius Caesar going to see him and accidentally crumpling his nose off.”

Indeed, even the efforts taken in embalming Ms. Franklin were a reflection of the period over which she ruled, fitting into a great tradition of skillful embalming at African-American funeral homes.

Stephanie Simon, the embalming manager at the Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home in New Orleans, which is known for elaborate preparations and display of clients’ family members, answered the phone Friday from the embalming room, where she was listening to Ms. Franklin’s funeral service. “African-Americans, we tend to hold a body a little longer,” she said of the tradition of embalming. “We want all of the relatives and friends to come from around the country. We would like them to attend the service as well.”