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In London, the V&A’s latest blockbuster fashion exhibition, the hotly anticipated “Marie Antoinette Style,” feels almost like a séance. It has everything you would expect from a no-holds-barred, couture-filled reassessment of the extravagant French queen—the pomp and circumstance, stunning gowns, shimmering jewels, impossibly elegant furnishings, luminous portraiture, items which have never before left Versailles—but, even more remarkably, it manages to conjure her spirit, in all its complexity.
“Marie Antoinette’s legacy is obviously most pronounced in fashion and style, and that was the case in her own time, too,” the exhibition’s curator, Dr. Sarah Grant, tells me, ahead of the opening of the showcase. “There was also the decorative arts, music, gardening—so many other areas of her patronage. But, I think there is something so intimate about clothes and accessories, and that felt like the key to unlocking more of a personal connection to her story.”
And it works. We first meet the monarch in an appropriately powder-pink opening room, with chequered floors that nod to Versailles, through a portrait of her swathed in silks and bows at the age of 22, by her favorite painter, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Then, you glide into the first of several showstoppers: a grand, mirrored space dripping with glittering light fixtures, which invites us inside the 14-year-old Marie’s life at court in 1770.
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There are extraordinary 18th-century gowns in this room—giant confections with wide, exaggerated skirts, florals, embroidery, endless ruffles, creamy silks, and pink candy cane stripes—but none more impressive than an incredibly intricate brocaded silk and silver thread wedding gown, with a bodice that seems almost carved from stone. All the mannequins on display here are also smaller and more childlike, a crucial reminder of Marie’s youth.
However, these dresses are not Marie’s—they’re simply styles she popularized. “There’s literally not a single entire gown that survives,” continues Grant. After the Revolution, “her wardrobe was looted, pieces were cut up and sold, and everything was dispersed.”
As a result, assembling the artifacts for “Marie Antoinette Style” required extensive detective work. Using records of Marie’s favorite fabrics, styles, and silhouettes, as well as paintings and prints she was featured in, and her own 1782 “wardrobe book,” displayed here with fabric swatches and annotations, pieces were carefully selected to echo what she would have worn. The wedding dress, too, is one that is strikingly similar to Marie’s own, rather than the original or an exact copy. “It’s as close as we can get to seeing what Marie Antoinette would have looked like on her wedding day,” confirms Grant.
But far from feeling like a cop-out, it makes the pieces here that actually belonged to Marie—on the exhibition labels, these are marked with the queen’s distinctive monogram—feel all the more special: a delicate black lace collar, dainty beaded shoes, and two richly embellished fragments of court gowns, designed to sparkle in candlelight. “To have these two surviving samples,” says Grant, “gives you a taste of how exceptional her gowns would have been.”
Up next is a deep dive into her jewels. Marie’s personal jewelry was smuggled out of France and kept by her only surviving child, Marie Thérèse, but in “Marie Antoinette Style,” many of these displayed pieces are reuniting with Marie’s own elegant jewelry casket for the first time since her death. You’ll find eye-popping diamonds, brooches, and pendants here, after which we’re taken through galleries examining Marie’s hairdos, the work of her hairdresser Monsieur Léonard and stylist Rose Bertin.
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There are also bejeweled fans to admire, panels of 18th-century animal print, letters in the queen’s own hand, and a section dedicated to her escape to the Petit Trianon—all floral-printed furniture, porcelain plates, Toile de Jouy, tinkling pianos, and, hilariously, gardening tools that were only used for staged performances of pastoral idylls.
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The next section is genius: a chapter devoted to scents, a particular obsession of Marie’s. “Versailles was very fragranced,” explains Grant. “Everybody reported that it smelled bad because so many people were crowded together, and there were things like chamber pots and cesspits, so Marie Antoinette was burning scents in her room and entirely perfumed from head to toe. It was also a way of projecting her allure and status.”
To that end, four faux marble busts are displayed, infused with four fragrances that tell Marie’s story and draw you fully into her world. The first, a mix of beeswax, smoke, oak, and body odor, transport you to a masquerade ball in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. The second is orris root, rose, lavender, tuberose, violet, and musk, the aroma of Marie’s own powder and rouge, which takes you directly to her mid-morning dressing table. The third evokes her dreamy garden at the Petit Trianon, with grass, lilac, roses, and honeysuckle.
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After that, the fourth comes as a shock: mildew, cold stone, sewage, and the polluted Seine, which takes us to Marie Antoinette’s cramped, dank cell. Leaning in to breathe in the fragrance, you can detect a note of juniper amongst the stench—something the queen had asked to be burned to purify the air of her prison. You can almost sense her presence, just out of reach. “We wanted something else to counter all that beauty,” says Grant. “To bring you the reality.”
That brutal reality follows. The next section is a miniature delight that could conceivably be titled “The cancellation of Marie Antoinette”: a closer look at her notoriety in the 1780s, via satirical and degrading drawings that depicted her as an insatiable satyr. Here she is as a cartoonish hyena, or in the midst of a tryst with a royal guard, or passionately making out with her lady-in-waiting, the Duchesse de Polignac (Rose Byrne, to fans of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette).
Then comes an ominous booming music and a long, blood-red corridor, which leads us to the end of Marie’s life in 1793, at just 37. This room is the most affecting: it features sketches of her imprisonment and death; the final note she ever wrote in her prayer book, begging for mercy and thinking of her children; the guillotine blade which decapitated her; images of a wax bust of her severed head; and a medallion containing locks of her blonde hair. The centrepiece, though, is Marie Antoinette’s plain, white linen chemise, worn in prison. It seems to float, as if her ghost still inhabits it, and is notable for being the only complete garment worn by the queen on display. It forces us to imagine this larger-than-life figure in her final moments, stripped down to her bare bones.
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“Our incredible textile conservation team developed these special magnets so her chemise could be mounted like that,” explains Grant. “It does have the quality of an apparition. It was very important for us to try to make her death feel a bit more real. Otherwise, it’s just a sentence in a history book. But to have her clothes from prison, her actual hair, her last note—there’s a tactility to it. It’s also important because her style led to her end, in a way—it paved her way to the guillotine.”
The final two rooms grapple with this style legacy. The first centers on the queen’s memorialization during the Victorian era and up to the ’40s. There are two standout, Marie Antoinette–inspired ’20s Art Deco evening dresses here by Jeanne Lanvin that you shouldn’t miss. Then, it’s on to the pièce de résistance—a classic example of one of the jaw-dropping, gown-filled final rooms for which these epic V&A fashion exhibitions are justifiably famous.
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Turn right, and you’ll see Kate Moss kicking back at the Ritz in baby blue Alexander McQueen, as photographed by Tim Walker for Vogue. Turn left, and you’ll come to a cabinet of jewel-toned Manolo Blahniks created especially for Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. And then, suddenly, all around you are costume designer Milena Canonero’s astonishing, Oscar-winning creations for that film, alongside Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Dior couture featured in the BBC’s Marie Antoinette, a silk dress worn by Old Hollywood legend Norma Shearer in the 1938 Marie Antoinette, and Elle Fanning’s bright red Toile de Jouy from The Great.
Meanwhile, on the high fashion front, there’s much John Galliano-designed Dior couture, lace Vivienne Westwood, outlandish Moschino (including those iced cake dresses), ruffled Erdem, Alessandro Michele’s new Valentino, a bow-laden Meadham Kirchhoff ensemble, and a blush-pink Rihanna for Fenty X Puma satin jumpsuit and lace fan lent by the superstar herself.
There’s even a feathered fancy from Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel which was crafted for Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette-inspired Vogue shoot for the September 2006 issue. Surrounding them all are reproductions of Ladurée macaron towers and pastries, a key reference for the pastel palette of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, as well as Marie Antoinette’s Folly, a lavish and wonderfully detailed porcelain wall installation by artist Beth Katleman.
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Shortlisting dresses for this section was one of the most difficult aspects of finalizing “Marie Antoinette Style.” “We had 500 objects originally and now we have 250,” sighs Grant. “We just didn’t have space. There are entire Chanel and Galliano collections we could have displayed, but we just tried to choose the most iconic pieces—some cheeky, and some more elegant and classic.”
There’s another blue Chanel look from the “Coco Rock” collection, which nods to Marie Antoinette’s English riding coats, which didn’t make it in—Grant sometimes thinks of it, but there is, of course, so much more that did.
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One of her favorites is the Galliano Dior gown from the “Freud or Fetish” collection. “It has the guillotine on one side and the Petit Trianon on the other. The wig has mice crawling in and out of it, and she’s like a wind-up doll, so she’s got that mechanism at the back and her doll stuffing is coming out. It’s so clever.” And this is one of the few exhibitions where you can get close enough to appreciate all of that.
In the end, Grant is proudest of securing all the jewelry in “Marie Antoinette Style,” much of it from private collections. Some pieces “only just came to sale, so to convince people who’d just bought them at auction and had barely owned them for a day to let us borrow them, that was remarkable.”
Equally precious is the Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun portrait of Marie Antoinette from Versailles in which she’s holding a rose, “which they call their ‘Mona Lisa.’ I was amazed when they agreed to part with that, because it’s the most requested object in the whole of Versailles.” Grant gives me a guilty smile. “People will go to Versailles expecting to see it, but it’ll be here. I do feel bad… but that is also amazing.”
“Marie Antoinette Style” at London’s V&A is now on view.
