Marie Antoinette Style at the V&A
Marie Antoinette is a name already freighted with imagery: frothing lace and impossibly poufed silk, wigs towering like architectural feats, the improbable sight of a queen playing shepherdess among manicured sheep, a life of indulgence cut (literally) short by the French Revolution of 1789. We think we know her. We rely on shorthand: the frivolity, the gossip, the sex, the masquerades on the lawns of Versailles. But who was she, really? For the first time in Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum has attempted an answer. Curated with remarkable subtlety by Sarah Grant, the exhibition is as much a study of Antoinette’s taste in dress and décor as it is a meditation on her as a woman.
The exhibition unfolds chronologically, beginning with the theatre of the 1770s: gowns à la française and à la polonaise, their silks and laces shimmering under chandelier-like light. A fragment of ivory silk embroidered with sequins and threads of precious metal catches the eye; it radiates an impossible luxury. The galleries are hushed and dark, as though one had slipped into the queen’s boudoir.
The objects oscillate between spectacle and intimacy. A shoe, unbelievably small, suggests her celebrated “Versailles glide”, a manner of walking so smooth it appeared as though she floated. From this small relic, we glimpse the person: a petite figure, delicate feet, a young girl brought to France age 14, who would never grow old. Nearby stands the notorious bol-sein, the “breast bowl”, balanced on a tripod of ram’s heads. Long thought to be modelled on her own body, though in fact not, it is here placed beside portraits of the queen nursing her children, a gesture that broke with royal tradition. Her world is evoked through such fragments: a chair, a fan, a bracelet. Even her scent is present, with porcelain jars containing recreations of her perfumes, inviting visitors to breathe in what once lingered in her rooms.
What emerges is a figure both ostentatious and vulnerable. She surrounded herself with luxuries, from a gilded porcelain eye bath to ridiculously ornate gardening tools designed for her rustic theatricals. And yet, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for her, to recognise a woman misjudged, scrutinised and vilified by a deeply misogynistic press. As the Revolution intensified, Antoinette was recast as a sexual libertine and a figure of corruption. Pornographic pamphlets from the 1790s portray her in imagined encounters with soldiers and ladies-in-waiting, reducing the queen to a caricature of debasement. To encounter them now is unsettling and fascinating. At the time, they served not simply as mockery but as barometers of the hostility closing in around her, and as ominous signs of the fate that awaited her.
The exhibition devotes a significant section to her enduring afterlife. Her style survived the guillotine, inspiring Empress Eugénie, who revived elements of the queen’s wardrobe in the mid-19th-century “French Revival” aesthetic that spread across Britain and North America. By the late 19th century, Art Nouveau and Art Deco designers such as Jeanne Lanvin and Boué Soeurs found new ways to channel her legacy. The final gallery, “Marie Antoinette Re-Style,” carries the story into the 20th and 21st centuries. Film costumes, most memorably from Sofia Coppola’s candy-coloured vision, are displayed alongside creations by Vivienne Westwood, Moschino, Valentino and Dior. The continuity is unmistakable. More than two hundred years after her death, Marie Antoinette remains a muse.
The most affecting gallery, however, is also the smallest. It focuses on her final days. On the morning of her execution in October 1793, she wrote in her prayer book: “My lord, have pity on me! My eyes have no more tears to cry for you, my poor children; adieu, adieu.” The book hangs near the plain white gown she wore in prison, translucent and spectral. It is this quiet garment, not the sequinned silks or the perfumed airs, that lingers.
From the opening gallery to the final display, the exhibition is a masterclass in elegance, drama and nuance. It will appeal equally to devotees of fashion history and to those drawn to the tangled complexities of a historical character. And for visitors unwilling to part with Marie Antoinette entirely, the V&A has devised a gift shop that sparkles with froth, lace and glittering indulgences, temptations that few will resist…
Constance Ayrton
Photos: Courtesy of the V&A Museum
Marie Antoinette Style is at the V&A from 20th September 2025 until 22nd March 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.
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