Marie Antoinette: The Queen of Style Who Never Goes Out of Fashion

At London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, a new exhibition examines the construction and persistence of a style that, from the late eighteenth century to the present day, has shaped fashion, interiors, the decorative arts, photography and cinema. Marie Antoinette Style (until March 22, 2026) retraces the birth and transformations of the imagery surrounding the most scrutinised and controversial queen of modernity, bringing together more than 250 works including garments, jewels, furnishings and historical images alongside contemporary couture and screen costumes. The exhibition combines exceptional loans from the Château de Versailles and other international collections with highlights from the V&A, offering a scholarly rather than hagiographic reading of Marie Antoinette. The show, presented chronologically, begins with the years at court and follows the queen to her death, dispelling enduring myths - starting with the famous “let them eat cake” - while recognising her as a pioneer of taste, attentive to childhood, motherhood and new technologies of her time. Among the most notable objects are richly embroidered court dress fragments, her own silk slippers, jewels from her private collection, tableware from the Petit Trianon and accessories from her toilette, displayed alongside is a replica of the famous Boehmer and Bassenge Diamond Necklace, paired with the museum’s Sutherland Necklace, believed to contain some of the original stones. Along the way, an olfactory experience recreates the scents of the court, including the queen’s favourite perfume. The second half of the exhibition examines the construction of the “cult” of Marie Antoinette in the nineteenth century, promoted by Empress Eugénie, and follows twentieth-century reinventions from Art Nouveau to Art Déco through to today’s visual culture. Here echoes of the queen converse with signature fashion by Dior, Chanel, Erdem, Valentino, Moschino and Vivienne Westwood, with photographs by Tim Walker and Robert Polidori and with costumes that have fixed the queen’s pop version in the global imagination, such as those from Sofia Coppola’s film, worn with Manolo Blahnik-designed shoes. The project, arriving as the V&A continues to probe the relationship between fashion, luxury and history, restores a complex figure: not only an icon of waste and scapegoat for prerevolutionary discontent, but also an influencer avant la lettre able to shape European taste. Advance reviews have also highlighted a curatorial choice of strong symbolic impact: the inclusion of a guillotine blade, closing the narrative next to the queen’s final letter from prison, balancing fascination, spectacle and tragedy.