When the Victoria and Albert Museum opened Marie Antoinette Style in autumn 2025, it marked the first major British exhibition devoted to France’s last queen — and, crucially, to an Austrian archduchess whose transnational identity has long been occluded by the theatrical excesses of Versailles. The exhibition, running from September 2025 to March 2026 in Galleries 38 and 39, presents a rare opportunity to reevaluate Marie Antoinette as both a historical figure and an enduring aesthetic phenomenon. Across more than 250 objects — from silk slippers and diamond parures to film costumes and couture reinterpretations — the curatorial team constructs a narrative of mythmaking as much as monarchy: a study of how a Habsburg princess became the most famous scapegoat in modern European history, and later, a global symbol of feminine style and defiance.

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Reframing the Queen: From Vienna to Versailles

One of the exhibition’s great strengths lies in its insistence on contextualising Marie Antoinette’s early life as an Austrian archduchess within the political mechanics of 18th-century diplomacy. The first gallery space, softly lit and draped in pale silk, evokes the atmosphere of the Habsburg court in Vienna, with didactic panels outlining Empress Maria Theresa’s strategy of dynastic marriages. Portraits of a young Antoinette, delicate yet resolute, flank objects associated with her education and upbringing — a reminder that the teenage dauphine sent to France in 1770 was less the frivolous ingénue of later legend than a pawn in the long game of Habsburg statecraft. This framing matters. Too often, Anglo-French retellings of her life begin at Versailles, erasing the formative imperial milieu that shaped her identity and comportment. Here, the V&A’s curators — led by senior curator of fashion, Dr. Clare Browne — make a deliberate effort to recover that lost Austrian chapter. The inclusion of a letter written by Maria Theresa to her daughter, chiding her for lapses in decorum, bridges maternal authority and imperial expectation. The object speaks volumes about the gendered pedagogy of queenship: a daughter’s body and manners as extensions of dynastic power.

Material Splendour and Political Symbolism

The second and third rooms immerse the visitor in the visual world of Versailles. The display of textiles, fashion plates, and accessories is exquisite, yet the curatorial voice remains critical rather than celebratory. A reconstructed court robe à la française glitters beneath controlled lighting, its brocaded silk interwoven with metallic threads that shimmer like political gold. Beside it, fragments of genuine 18th-century gowns — some believed to have belonged to the queen herself — are displayed flat, reminding us of their fragility and the material reality of royal display. One remarkable inclusion is a pair of pale blue silk slippers reputedly worn by Marie Antoinette at Petit Trianon. Their delicacy borders on the spectral, the faint creases at the toes suggesting a ghostly presence. Nearby vitrines display objects from her toilette, including ivory combs, snuffboxes, and a fan painted with pastoral scenes. Yet the didactic panels resist romanticisation. Instead, they trace how consumption and femininity became conflated in revolutionary discourse — how her taste for luxury was reinterpreted as evidence of moral degeneracy. The exhibition thus foregrounds not simply what Marie Antoinette wore, but what her society saw in her wearing it.

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From Ornament to Outrage

The exhibition’s middle section, “The Making of a Monster,” shifts tone dramatically. Visitors step into darker, more claustrophobic galleries, where political caricatures of the 1780s and 1790s line the walls. Here, the queen’s image metastasises into propaganda. British and French prints depict her as a harlot, harpy, and traitor, her body weaponised as a symbol of corruption. The curators draw sharp attention to the gendered violence of this visual culture: the obsessive fixation on her sexuality, the perverse delight in her supposed extravagance, the conflation of femininity with treachery. A particularly striking juxtaposition places a mocking pamphlet, L’Autrichienne Dévoilée, beside a mourning medallion produced after her execution. The former dehumanises, the latter sanctifies — and between them, the exhibition traces the pendulum of public sentiment. The inclusion of her final letter, written to her sister-in-law Elisabeth before her death in 1793, offers a moment of stark intimacy. Rendered in her own hand, the text reveals a calm and dignity rarely associated with the woman who has so often been reduced to caricature. It is in this quiet corner, more than in the rooms of silk and gilt, that the visitor feels the human cost of her myth.

Afterlives and Reinterpretations

The final sections explore Marie Antoinette’s cultural afterlife from the 19th century to the present day. Here, Marie Antoinette Style broadens its scope from historical reconstruction to a meditation on representation itself. Fashion, film, and art have repeatedly resurrected her — not as a monarch, but as a cipher for the anxieties and fantasies of modern femininity. Contemporary designers appear in dialogue with history: Dior’s opulent gowns, Vivienne Westwood’s subversive corsets, Moschino’s ironic pastiches. The juxtaposition of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film costume beside archival Rococo garments encapsulates the exhibition’s argument: that “Marie Antoinette” is less a person than a cultural language — one that oscillates between decadence and defiance. In a clever curatorial move, a looping projection of Coppola’s pastel-hued Versailles plays opposite revolutionary engravings, underscoring the tension between cinematic spectacle and historical suffering. This section also acknowledges the globalisation of her image. Japanese Lolita fashion, high couture editorials, and references from pop stars (from Madonna to Lady Gaga) are presented not as trivial ephemera, but as contemporary iterations of the same aesthetic of excess. The queen’s sartorial radicalism — once condemned — has become a mode of self-expression, especially among women reclaiming artifice and ornament as sites of agency.

Gender, Power, and Perception

Throughout, the exhibition succeeds in dismantling the persistent binaries that have long defined Marie Antoinette’s historiography: frivolous versus tragic, saint versus sinner, victim versus villain. Instead, it offers a more complex reading of how power, performance, and gender intersect. The queen’s aesthetic excess, it suggests, was not merely decorative but strategic — an assertion of identity within a patriarchal court that afforded her few avenues for authority. That the exhibition is housed at the V&A, the world’s preeminent museum of design, is fitting. Marie Antoinette Stylereminds us that fashion and politics have always been intertwined, and that the body — particularly the female body — remains a contested terrain of meaning. The curatorial voice maintains a delicate balance between admiration and critique, avoiding both hagiography and moralism. The result is a profoundly human portrait of a woman caught between the demands of empire, nation, and myth.

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Curatorial Achievement and Limitations

If there is a limitation, it lies in the absence of an explicit Habsburg epilogue. While the early sections acknowledge her Viennese roots, the exhibition might have pursued this thread further — tracing how the Austrian court interpreted her downfall, or how later Habsburg women (notably Empress Elisabeth) inherited aspects of her aesthetic legacy. Nevertheless, the exhibition’s transnational framing marks an important shift away from Francocentric narratives, positioning Marie Antoinette within a broader European continuum of female representation. The installation design, too, deserves mention: careful lighting preserves fragile textiles while evoking the chiaroscuro of both salon and scaffold. Soundscapes — the murmur of court gossip, the tolling of revolutionary bells — enhance the immersive experience without veering into theatricality. Each object feels contextualised rather than fetishised.

Conclusion: The Afterimage of a Queen

Marie Antoinette Style is more than a fashion exhibition; it is an essay in material culture and myth. By navigating the intersections of costume, politics, and gendered perception, the V&A has crafted an experience that is both intellectually rigorous and visually sumptuous. For scholars of 18th-century Europe — and particularly those concerned with Habsburg identity, dynastic femininity, and the politics of representation — this exhibition offers fertile ground for reflection.

In the end, the queen who “let them eat cake” — a phrase she never uttered — emerges not as a cautionary tale of excess, but as a mirror of modern obsessions: with celebrity, consumption, and the performance of self. Through silk and satire, through myth and memory, Marie Antoinette Style reveals how an Austrian archduchess became both victim and author of her own legend.

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