Words Dolores O’Donoghue
The V&A South Kensington is hosting the UK’s first exhibition dedicated to Marie Antoinette, one of history’s most enigmatic fashion icons. Marie Antoinette Style brings together 250 objects, ranging from rare personal possessions never before seen outside Versailles to haute couture creations by Dior, Chanel, Moschino and Vivienne Westwood, charting the extravagant aesthetic of the ill-fated French queen and her lasting influence on over two centuries of art, fashion and design.
On view are the queen’s silk slippers, jewels from her private collection, fragments of court gowns and even the poignant final note she penned before her execution. Many of these treasures, including her delicate dinner service from the Petit Trianon and accessories from her personal toilette case, are travelling to London for the first time, thanks to exceptional loans from the Château de Versailles.
The exhibition will not only explore the fashions of 18th-century France, but also how Marie Antoinette’s image has been endlessly reinterpreted. Through immersive displays, theatrical staging and a specially created scent experience evoking the aromas of the French court, her world will be vividly reimagined. Exhibits include costumes from Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst, as well as shoes designed by Manolo Blahnik for the film. These will appear alongside contemporary couture, illustrating how her style has inspired designers and creatives for generations.
Far more than a tale of silk and embroidery, Marie Antoinette Style examines the cultural legacy of a woman whose life embodied glamour, spectacle and tragedy. Curator Sarah Grant describes her as, ‘The most fashionable, scrutinised and controversial queen in history. Marie Antoinette’s name summons both visions of excess and objects and interiors of great beauty. The Austrian archduchess turned queen of France had an enormous impact on European taste and fashion in her own time, creating a distinctive style that now has universal appeal and application. This exhibition explores that style and the figure at its centre, using a range of exquisite objects belonging to Marie Antoinette, alongside the most beautiful fine and decorative objects that her legacy has inspired. This is the design legacy of an early modern celebrity and the story of a woman whose power to fascinate has never ebbed.’ Presented chronologically, the exhibition is staged in three sections:
Marie Antoinette: The Origins of a Style. Beginning with her arrival in France in 1770, the collection reveals the origins of her signature aesthetic, a blend of opulence, refinement and a flair for spectacle, through exquisite furniture, porcelain, musical instruments and jewels, including a replica of the infamous Boehmer and Bassenge diamond necklace from the diamond necklace affair of 1784–85, as well as intimate personal effects.
Marie Antoinette Memorialised: The Birth of a Style Cult. Here, the narrative moves through the 19th century’s romantic reinventions, where Empress Eugénie and leading couturiers recast the queen as an icon of elegance and tragedy, sparking a frenzy among collectors and inspiring lavish French Revival interiors. Highlight objects include fancy dress costumes by Worth and other couturiers and photographs by Eugène Atget and Francis Frith.
Marie Antoinette Re-Styled. In the final section, Marie Antoinette steps firmly into the modern imagination, her style reimagined by fashion houses from Dior to Westwood and revived in cinema, photography and even music videos. From Dunst’s pastel-hued costumes in Coppola’s film to contemporary works by artists and designers, the display reveals how the queen’s legend, part glamour, part tragedy, continues to inspire, provoke and captivate.
The exhibition runs at V&A South Kensington until 22 March 2026 and is sponsored by Manolo Blahnik, with support from Kathryn Uhde.
- ‘Marie Antoinette Style: Glamour, tragedy and the making of an icon’ is published in Anthology Volume 24. Read more features from this volume or buy it now.
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