“I did have it most of my life—this obsession with Marie Antoinette,” Manolo Blahnik confides. It began in childhood, he says, when, growing up in the Canary Islands, his mother read aloud a biography of the queen: picnics, operas, dinners—“another world.” That early enchantment has only intensified over time and, as of this week, it manifests in a capsule of shoes timed to coincide with the Victoria Albert Museum’s landmark exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style. It is Blahnik at his most deliciously anachronistic: eleven new styles that flirt with the eighteenth century and land squarely in 2025.
Lest we think he’s merely a devoted admirer, Blahnik and Marie go way back. He’s kept her close—reading biographies, seeing every film and exhibition, and trading long conversations with Karl Lagerfeld about the eighteenth century. It’s why, when Sofia Coppola called in 2006 in need of footwear for Marie Antoinette, he could design around forty pairs with instinctive ease—raiding archives at the V&A, the Musée Carnavalet, and the textile houses of Lyon; working up pastels and embroidered satins; even adapting period-appropriate fabrics.
Milena Canonero, the film’s Oscar-winning costume designer, tells Vogue that the decision to enlist him was inevitable. “I was interested to make special shoes for Marie Antoinette’s character, played by Kirsten Dunst. Apart from the period footwear constructed by the theatrical workshop in Rome, Manolo’s input would be fresh, unusual, and significant. I sent him references of 18th-century shoes I liked, the palette I was using for Kirsten, and her foot imprint. The rest was up to Manolo. I loved them all.”
“I even used a silk-embroidered textile I found in London—at Claremont in Chelsea—which they told me was a reproduction of a fabric Marie Antoinette had,” Blahnik says. But that’s not to say his designs didn’t hew to history at all. “On the phone, Sofia said, ‘Don’t be too academic. Do whatever you want,’” he remembers. He did exactly that for the film—and so too for this new capsule collection.
Out now is not just a macaron-hued box of frilled shoes. Yes, there are sugared pastels—powder-puff pinks and almondine blues—but Blahnik also salts the selection with moody, modern jewel tones: cherry, olive with scarlet piping, even a solemn black satin homage to Antoinette’s final walk to the guillotine.
You can read it style by style. Rohan: a mule trimmed with box-pleat fringing, a frayed silk edge, and a pale-green brooch—a sister shoe to the green “Autruchien” from Coppola’s film. Montmédy arrives in powder-puff pink with a soft, tufted spirit, nodding to the queen’s rose garden. Pléneuf laces the vamp like a ballet corset—Rococo-sweet if you let it be, wicked if you don’t. Around them whirl a court of names that feel like petits-fours on the tongue—Nattier, Fontettes, Valoisette, Hebes, Merode, Palissot, Clémentel, Nolhac—each tuned to a different facet of Versailles temperament.
To wear these in 2025 is to indulge in a kind of double nostalgia. First: for the 2006 cult memory of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, that pastel-bomb of a movie with The Strokes on the soundtrack and champagne in the bath. And then: for the queen herself, who still captivates, centuries on.
Opening September 20, the V&A’s Marie Antoinette Style is the UK’s first exhibition devoted to the queen, gathering 250 objects—from her own silk slippers and jewels to the final note she wrote—with major loans from Versailles never before seen outside France. The show moves chronologically: origins (1770–1793); then the nineteenth-century revival fueled by Empress Eugénie; an Art Nouveau/Deco fantasia of illustrators like Erté and couturiers like Lanvin; and finally modern re-stylings in couture (Dior, Chanel, Westwood, Valentino) and film. Crucially, for the first time, Blahnik’s working drawings for Coppola’s film shoes will be exhibited—a full-circle moment, since his candy-colored designs began with studying original eighteenth-century shoes in the V&A’s own archives.
“Her dignity stays with me even now,” Blahnik says of the queen’s last moments, recalling the black satin shoes she is said to have worn to the guillotine—and her whispered apology for stepping on the executioner’s foot.
Perhaps we return to Marie Antoinette because each era needs a heroine of spectacle: a woman both watched and self-possessed, both ornament and author. The nineteenth century romanticized her; Art Deco stylized her; Coppola teen-queen-ed her; and now Blahnik gives her back to us, not as costume but as equipment for life. The shoes are historical in flavor, contemporary in appetite. They ask to be lived in—to tap across parquet, pavement, terrazzo; to go with chiffon, jersey, leather, denim.
If the women of the 1930s had Norma Shearer as queen in costume designer Adrian’s decadent, pearl-encrusted gowns, and the teens of the aughts had Coppola’s candy-colored fantasia, then perhaps today’s generation will meet Marie Antoinette anew at the V&A. The exhibition offers a queen reframed for the TikTok era—an ingénue, an icon, a study in spectacle and survival. And better yet, thanks to Blahnik, today’s devotees can quite literally walk in her shoes.
