Marie Antoinette Style at the V&A

Sweep over to V&A South Kensington for the UK’s first exhibition on the French queen Marie Antoinette. The exhibition explores the origins and countless revivals of the style shaped by the most fashionable queen in history and an early modern ‘celebrity’.

The dress and interiors modelled and adopted by the ill-fated Queen of France in the final decades of the eighteenth century have had a lasting influence on over 250 years of design, fashion, film and decorative arts. To illustrate this, 250 objects, including exceptional loans from the Château de Versailles never before seen outside France, are on display, alongside key objects from the V&A’s own collection.

The exhibition traces the cultural impact of the Marie Antoinette style and her ongoing inspiration for leading designers and creatives, from Sofia Coppola and Manolo Blahnik to Moschino and Vivienne Westwood. The exhibition features contemporary clothing including couture pieces by designers such as Moschino, Dior, Chanel, Erdem, Vivienne Westwood and Valentino and costumes made for screen, such as for Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst, as well as shoes designed by Manolo Blahnik for the film.

On display are exceptionally rare personal items owned and worn by Marie Antoinette including richly embellished fragments of court dress, the Queen’s own silk slippers, and jewels from her private collection. Other highlight objects which have never left Versailles or France before, including personal effects such as the queen’s dinner service from the Petit Trianon, her accessories and intimate items from her toilette case.

Marie Antoinette shaped not just the fashion, design, interiors, gardens, fine and decorative arts of her own time but has continued to exert an influence over more than two and a half centuries of graphic and decorative arts, fashion, photography, film and performance. Through theatrical staging and sensory experiences, the excessive, lavish and feminine style comes to life and sets the stage for over 250 years of style reimagined again and again. A scent experience re-creates scents of the court, and the perfume favoured by the Queen herself.