Marie Antoinette has been dead for more than two centuries, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. In London the Victoria & Albert Museum made him the main protagonist of the cultural autumn. The exhibition Marie Antoinette stylea journey through the fashion and decorative arts of its time, it is approaching 100,000 views and is sold out until January. In its crowded corridors, with a clear majority of women of all ages, the exhibition brings together almost 300 works, clothes and objects, including 17 loans from Versailles that had never left France. It is not limited to the inventory of relics, but offers an analysis of that devotion that our era continues to project on the wife of Louis XVI, despite her end on the guillotine.
The exhibition, which can be visited until March 22, examines how a queen without political power managed to impose herself through the strategic use of fashion and the staging of a role aimed at the public, in a rare gesture of modernity. His wardrobe dominates the rooms, synonymous with the luxury of his century. For example, the Queen of Sweden’s 1774 wedding dress, a replica of a now-lost Marie Antoinette dress and perhaps the most impressive piece, with a stiff corset and silver threads that give it the appearance of armor. Also on display are her silk slippers, jewelry and accessories, an armchair with her monogram and the jatte-téton of Sèvres porcelain, a breast-shaped cup whose realism fueled the legend that it had been modeled on the queen’s breast. Like so many things about Marie Antoinette, it was false.
From brightness to darkness, the journey ends with his public lynching in the years preceding his execution in 1793, at the age of 37. Pornographic cartoons portrayed her as lesbian and depraved, while some pamphlets dubbed her Madame Deficit, ammunition for revolutionary propaganda. In the final section, the London exhibition displays the white nightgown she wore in the Conciergerie prison, the guillotine blade to which her execution is attributed – from the historic collection of Madame Tussauds -, a medallion with her hair intertwined with that of her son and the final note from her prayer book: “My God, have mercy on me. My eyes have no more tears to cry for you, my poor offspring. Goodbye, goodbye”.
Before this end, the fifteenth daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria knew how to conquer her time thanks to her dazzling image. He did it methodically: he worked with Rose Bertin and Léonard Autié, creators of his silhouette and eighteenth-century precursors of today’s stylists, and he had the media complicity of Ladies’ Journalthe magazine Rowing of time. Even as a teenager she understood the theater of Versailles and knew how to exploit it: at her husband’s coronation, when she was just 18, she wore an embroidered dress studded with sapphires that caught everyone’s attention.
His shirt to the queena white muslin tunic without corset or crinoline, marked a departure from rigid courtly etiquette. He dared to use animal prints and popularized the toile de jouycotton printed in plain colors with pastoral scenes, which passed from tapestries and curtains to clothes. “She was very intelligent and her relationship with fashion was strategic, not superficial. As a young and image-conscious queen, she understood clothing as a soft power and as an engine of the nascent French luxury industry,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Sarah Grant.
“Without exempting her from her responsibilities, the Revolution used tools of discredit and applied them with unprecedented violence: she was the bad queen, the bad woman and the bad mother,” says historian Cécile Berly.
The queen never disappeared, but today she is everywhere. In 2026, the Château de Fontainebleau, on the southern outskirts of Paris, will dedicate the entire year’s program to Marie Antoinette, restore the Grand Apartments to their eighteenth-century appearance and inaugurate an exhibition on the queen’s stay in the country. chateauthe only one in France inhabited by all its sovereigns. Meanwhile, the second season of the series Marie Antoinette —a co-production of the BBC and Canal+, available in Spain on Movistar Plus+— continues to bring his biography closer to the general public. And on the catwalk, Alessandro Michele’s debut for Valentino’s new haute couture collection revisits the imagery of Versailles with monumental silhouettes and reinterpreted period details, further proof that the queen’s style remains a living repertoire.
In reality, Marie Antoinette shaped not only the fashion and arts of her time, but two centuries of visual culture. The London exhibition documents its nineteenth-century resurrection, promoted by Eugenia de Montijo, an absolute admirer of her predecessor: a romantic and sentimental story that triggered the demand for the “French” style and reintegrated its codes into bourgeois taste. It then addresses fantasies of the early decades of the 20th century, with the Petit Trianon idealized as a place of escape, beauty and excess, and leads to its contemporary legacy in fashion and cinema. Silhouettes by Dior, Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, Valentino and Jeremy Scott for Moschino parade, with oversized wigs and reinvented frames, along with the shoes that Manolo Blahnik created for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film.
Badly received at first but very influential afterwards, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette dared to put Converse sneakers on the queen, to transform Versailles into something similar to a rave and, above all, reduce the French Revolution to a three-second gamble. The director was inspired by the benevolent reading of Antonia Fraser’s biography, which helped change his image, from a spendthrift despot who conscientiously ignored the famine that was devouring his country to a candid adolescent hedonist and martyr of the Revolution, whose bad reputation would only be the result of misogynistic clichés. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between.
The exhibition does not absolve her, but aims to open up perspectives. If we look at her with fascination it is because she is very contemporary: Marie Antoinette demonstrates how a woman without power can conquer it thanks to a skilful use of her public image. And how society responds to this phenomenon with admiration and desire to imitate it, until the cycle ends and the fascination turns into cruelty and ridicule. The writer Adam Thirlwell, who in The future future (Anagrama) recounted the public insult of a woman in Paris—with cameo of the queen herself in her novel – sums it up bluntly. “Marie Antoinette is the most famous victim of male defamation. The machine that built her reputation was the same for many other women: a language free from any responsibility,” says the British author. “We shouldn’t be so narrow-minded as to believe that our era is unique. It’s just that violence today uses different means than in the past.”
His case anticipates a recognizable phenomenon: from Kim Kardashian onwards, the image gradually replaces the identity, while intimacy ceases to exist to become a permanent showcase. It is no coincidence that her ex, the singer Kanye West, called her “the Marie Antoinette of our times”, nor that the interested party dressed up as a queen for an energy drink advertisement in 2015. Today the echoes of the unfortunate queen abound in countless ambassadors of luxury brands without the right to speak, but omnipresent in the world, in a gallery of personalities without a clear profession who make the world economy go round.
“Marie Antoinette can be considered, in a certain sense, one of the first influencers of history,” says French historian Cécile Berly, 18th century specialist and author of guillotined (Fund for Economic Culture), an essay on the women convicted in 1793. The book investigates the extent of their smear campaign. “Without exempting her from her responsibilities, the Revolution used tools of discredit and applied them with unprecedented violence. In 1789 she had already been the object of visceral hatred for a decade: she was the evil queen, the evil woman and the evil mother,” says Berly. For the historian, Marie Antoinette cannot be considered a feminist in the strict sense, since she was alien to any type of struggle for equality, but she embodies “a precedent of emancipation, claiming her own spaces and participating in the emergence of a right to privacy”.
The current re-read of the character comes with some fixes. For example, that the famous “Let them eat cake” is apocryphal, as Fraser had already underlined when publishing his biography in 2001. As the historian Colin Jones explains in the catalog of the London exhibition, this attribution would have been established decades after his death and would come from a “great princess” cited by Rousseau in his Confessions. The phrase thrived because it reflected the resentment of a country that knew what black bread, famine and the most flagrant inequality were. Any resemblance to the present, with cities privatized to celebrate millionaires’ weddings and former presidents behind bars in a country mired in deficit and where the air of the end of the reign is in the air, is purely coincidental.
