Marie Antoinette Style: V&A
- Catherine Flutsch
- 25 minutes ago
- 4 min read
★★★★★
Exhibition Review: Marie Antoinette Style, Open from 20 September 2025 until March 2026. Tickets from £6.50. Book tickets here.
[Disclosure: I attended the press preview for free on 17 September and received a 20% discount on all merchandise.]
Few figures have been so persistently reduced to cliché as Marie Antoinette. The V&A’s new exhibition, opening today, is the first in the UK devoted solely to her. It sweeps aside the lazy, misogynistic tropes and instead reveals a complex figure: a young woman who shaped the cultural imagination of her age and whose influence across art and culture can be vividly felt today.
The show is packed with fabulous exhibits, many of them displayed in public for the first time since Marie Antoinette’s death. Yet beneath the splendour runs a thoughtful, scholarly narrative. So you can visit and just enjoy the fabulousness, or, if the mood takes you, you can go a little bit deeper.
The exhibition is divided into two parts: her life and her influence.
The first half traces her compressed story—married at 14, queen at 18, guillotined at 37. Every stage is illustrated with objects that vividly bring her to life as a real girl and young woman.
The exhibition makes clear that she fulfilled her dual duties of producing an heir and exercising soft power through her patronage of national luxury industries. However, despite lacking political power, the exhibition shows that she did carve out spaces of agency.
Marie Antoinette was the first French queen to nurse her child, subtly redefining aristocratic motherhood. She also embraced Enlightenment ideals of science and health, adopting new habits of personal hygiene and a diet that included milk. She also championed innovation in porcelain and textile manufacture.
Her taste reshaped the culture – and the exhibits show her influence on fashion, interiors, architecture, fragrance, garden design, music and furniture. She pushed against the heavy formality of Versailles towards something lighter, fresher and recognisably modern. Many of the businesses she championed still survive in France today.
The second half of the exhibition turns to legacy. Marie Antoinette’s preference for lighter lines, fresher colours and a cultivated world of scent and surface shaped an aesthetic that remains instantly recognisable. What might have seemed like the passing taste of a queen without political power has proved extraordinarily enduring, echoing through the arts and resurfacing in contemporary design. Here the exhibition is at its strongest, setting her gowns and furnishings alongside striking homages from Manolo Blahnik—the exhibition’s sponsor—together with Chanel, Galliano, Westwood and Moschino.
My favourite element in the whole exhibition is the emphasis on her scented world. Versailles was crowded and unsanitary, so perfume was refinement but also necessity. At the Petit Trianon she planted hyacinths, violets, roses, jasmine, orange blossom and lilac, bringing fragrance indoors and out. The exhibition recreates the “scent scapes” of her life, using ingenious diffusers in the shape of her bust, made of the white biscuit porcelain she helped popularise. You lean in close and inhale—something she herself would surely have approved.
It is the first time I have seen scent scapes used in a historical exhibition, and they bring her world to life in a way that no other medium could. We breathe in the air of a masquerade ball, her toilette, her gardens. Most haunting is the recreation of her final prison cell: damp stone, polluted river air, open sewers, and the acrid smoke of burning juniper she reportedly requested to mask the stench.
The show also confronts the relentless attacks on her reputation, which feel eerily familiar. Pamphlets mocked her morality, her excess, her sexuality, her supposed sway over her husband. It was an early form of celebrity character assassination, not unfamiliar today. These pamphlets – displayed in the exhibition and many shocking even by today’s standards - helped bring her downfall.
Curator Sarah Grant has done a remarkable job of restoring humanity to a young woman long denied it. The exhibition allows us to meet her as a person rather than a caricature: not perfect, but striving to live on her own terms within unbearable constraints.
As you might expect, the merchandising is broad. Two items from the museum shop stand out. The catalogue is one of the best I’ve come across – balancing frivolity with scholarship. It includes lively, short essays on fashion, scent and design alongside serious scholarship. So far, my favourite essay is Daniel Slater on Marie Antoinette and sapphic love. I’m going to read the whole thing like a novel! The second item that might be worth buying is the tea blended specially for the exhibition by Ladurée. Beautifully presented, it is floral, elegant and faintly unsettling—a clever evocation of the exhibition itself.
This is a beautiful exhibition with wide appeal. You can go simply to be surrounded by gorgeous things. You can immerse yourself in history. Or you can look deeper and see a historical figure recast as a real human being, through a fresh, misogyny-free lens.
Featured image Kate Moss, Fashion: Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Julian d'Ys, The Ritz, Paris, 2012, for Vogue US, April 2012 issue.
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