‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the V&A dares us to consider the woman beneath the artifice

Opening this week (20 September 2025) V&A South Kensington is presenting a landmark exhibition on the most mythologised queen in European history: ‘Marie Antoinette Style’. Across 250 objects, this exhibition, sponsored by Manolo Blahnik, traces the 18th-century monarch’s origins as a fashion icon, concluding in the present day with pieces from contemporary designers exemplifying her enduring legacy.

The show’s curator, Dr Sarah Grant, has gone to great lengths to present Marie Antoinette as both queen and young woman. As befits a queen, we are confronted with diamond jewellery of disarming, dazzling proportions, sumptuous textiles crafted by the most skilled hands, sinuous Rococo furniture, and elaborately decorated fans. But for the young woman: her spittoon, her toiletry case, her letters complaining about her incompatibility with her husband. These objects, many of which have never been exhibited outside of France, offer more of a sense of the corporality of their former owner than any number of exquisite dresses can.

‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the V&A

But Marie Antoinette doesn’t make it easy. The exhibition makes a valiant effort to pull away her mask and show us what lies beneath. But ultimately, what lies beneath is yet more mask. At the Petit Trianon, the queen’s pastoral idyll in the grounds of Versailles, where she retreated from the rigours of court life, gorgeous toile de jouy depicts scenes of bucolic bliss which surely the hungry French peasantry would have laughed in the face of, and a set of embellished gardening tools designed more for playacting than tilling. At every turn, a hall of mirrors with yet more artifice.

‘We’ve really tried to peek beneath the veneer of Marie Antoinette with these displays,’ Grant tells Wallpaper*. ‘But it’s important to remember that actually, her entire life was a performance. She eats in public, gives birth in public, washes her face in public. Every move she made was in front of the whole world.’

It was a public who were suspicious of Antoinette from the moment she first arrived in France from her native Austria, aged 14, to marry the dauphin who would become Louis XVI. She got the blame for many of the woes that befell her subjects for the next twenty years. Humiliating caricatures of her likeness on display at V&A demonstrate the ugliness of feeling towards her. Unfair, misogynistic pornography, or a valid political statement from the ones with nothing to eat, towards the one eating off a gilded plate? The jury is still out.

Four ceramic busts are impregnated with scents designed by Tasha Marks – smells which capture a vignette from Marie Antoinette’s short life – a stroke of curatorial genius, effectively inviting the audience to step into the queen’s size 3.5 shoes in a powerfully elemental way. ‘The 18th century court was a much more highly perfumed world than we’d recognise today, so scent is an essential way of understanding it,’ says Grant. ‘According to contemporary sources, Versailles was a bizarre combination of ornate interiors and the stench of open cess pits. Fragrance was used both to project allure, and to mask the visceral stink of a palace built with very few latrines.’ The most confronting fragrance is the final one, capturing the queen’s jail cell, a vile blend of raw sewage and mildew which Antoinette tried to mask with juniper. The result smells something like fear.

The world today is one that, in many ways, the French queen may have recognised. Political violence is top of the news agenda, the cult of celebrity still reigns supreme, the divide between those who have and those who have not is increasing once again, and everyone is looking for someone to blame. Even panniers, ruffles and bows are in fashion again, thanks in part to the likes of Jonathan Anderson, Simone Rocha, Cecile Bahnsen, and Pierpaolo Piccioli. Is it any wonder that her image has endured? In her lifetime, and in the centuries since her execution, Marie Antoinette exists as a symbol: of beauty, of elegance, of excess, of inequality, of scapegoatism. This exhibition offers a glimpse into each characterisation, and even dares us to consider that actually, behind the artifice, she was just a woman.

Marie Antoinette Style, sponsored by Manolo Blahnik runs from 20 September 2025 – 22 March 2026 at Galleries 38 & 39, V&A South Kensington. Tickets are on sale now.