Marie Antoinette has been dead for more than two centuries, although it does not always seem that way. In London, the Victoria & Albert Museum has made it the main protagonist of the cultural autumn. The exhibition Marie Antoinette Stylea journey through the fashion and decorative arts of its time, is approaching 100,000 views and is sold out until January. In its crowded hallways, with a clear majority of women of all ages, the exhibition brings together nearly 300 works, dresses and objects, including 17 loans from Versailles that had never left France. It is not limited to the inventory of relics, but proposes an analysis of that devotion that our era continues to project on the consort of Louis XVI, despite her end at the guillotine.
The exhibition, which can be seen until March 22, examines how a queen without political power managed to impose herself through a strategic use of fashion and the staging of a role facing the public, in a rare gesture of modernity. In the rooms his wardrobe dominates, the epitome of the luxury of his century. For example, the Queen of Sweden’s wedding dress from 1774, a replica of a now-lost Marie Antoinette outfit and perhaps the most impressive piece, with a rigid corset and silver threads that give it an appearance of armor. Also on display are her silk slippers, jewelry and accessories, an armchair with her monogram and the nipple bowl of Sèvres porcelain, a breast-shaped cup whose realism fueled the legend that it had been molded on the queen’s breast. Like so many things about Marie Antoinette, it was false.
From brightness to darkness, the journey closes with his public lynching in the years before his execution in 1793, at the age of 37. Pornographic cartoons depicted her as lesbian and depraved, while some pamphlets renamed her Madame Deficit, ammunition for revolutionary propaganda. In its final section, the London exhibition exhibits the white nightgown she wore in the Conciergerie prison, the guillotine blade to which her execution is attributed – from the historical collection of Madame Tussauds -, a medallion with her hair intertwined with her son’s and the final note in her prayer book: “My God, have mercy on me. My eyes no longer have tears to cry for you, my poor offspring. Farewell, farewell”.
Before that end, the fifteenth daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria knew how to conquer her time thanks to her dazzling image. He did it with method: he worked with Rose Bertin and Léonard Autié, architects of his silhouette and eighteenth-century precursors of today’s stylists, and he had the media complicity of the Ladies’ Journalthe magazine Vogue of the time. Since she was a teenager, she understood the theater of Versailles and knew how to exploit it: at her husband’s coronation, when she was barely 18 years old, she wore an embroidered dress trimmed with sapphires that captured everyone’s attention.
They are queen shirta white muslin tunic without a corset or crinoline, marked a turning point compared to the rigid courtly etiquette. He dared to use animal prints and popularized the Toile de Jouycotton printed in a single color with pastoral scenes, which went from upholstery and curtains to clothing. “She was very intelligent and her relationship with fashion was strategic, not superficial. As a young and image-conscious queen, she understood clothing as soft power and as an engine of the nascent French luxury industry,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Sarah Grant.
“Without exempting her from her responsibility, 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 Fontainebleau Castle, on the southern outskirts of Paris, will dedicate the entire year’s programming to Marie Antoinette, restore the Grand Apartments to their 18th-century appearance, and inaugurate an exhibition about the queen’s time in the country. châteauthe 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 Versailles imagery with monumental silhouettes and reinterpreted period details, further proof that the queen’s style remains a living repertoire.
In reality, Marie Antoinette not only shaped 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 fan of her predecessor: a romantic and sentimental story that triggered the demand for the “French-style” style and reinstated its codes in bourgeois taste. It then addresses the fantasies of the first decades of the 20th century, with the Petit Trianon idealized as a setting for escape, beauty and excess, and leads to its contemporary legacy in fashion and cinema. Silhouettes from Dior, Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, Valentino and Jeremy Scott for Moschino parade, with oversized wigs and reimagined frames, alongside the shoes Manolo Blahnik created for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film.
Badly received at its premiere but very influential later, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette dared to put Converse sneakers on the queen, to turn Versailles into something similar to a rave and, above all, to reduce the French Revolution to a three-second long shot. The director was inspired by the benevolent reading of Antonia Fraser’s biography, which helped alter her image, from the spendthrift despot who conscientiously ignored the famine that was eating away at her country to a candid, hedonistic teenager and martyr of the Revolution, whose bad reputation would only be the result of misogynistic clichés. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
The exhibition does not absolve her, but it strives to open perspectives. If we look at it with fascination it is because it is very contemporary: Marie Antoinette demonstrates how a woman without power can conquer it thanks to a clever use of her public image. And how society responds to this phenomenon with admiration and desire to imitate it, until the cycle runs out and fascination turns into cruelty and ridicule. The writer Adam Thirlwell, who in The future future (Anagrama) narrated the public insult of a woman in Marie Antoinette’s Paris—with cameo of the queen herself in her novel—summarizes it bluntly. “Marie Antoinette is the most famous victim of male defamation. The machinery that manufactured her reputation was the same for many other women: a language that floats free of all responsibility,” says the British author. “We shouldn’t be so parochial as to believe that our era is unique. It’s just that violence now uses different means than in the past.”
Her case anticipates a recognizable phenomenon: from Kim Kardashian onwards, image gradually replaces identity, while intimacy ceases to exist to become a permanent showcase. It is no coincidence that her ex, the singer Kanye West, described her as “the Marie Antoinette of our time”, nor that the interested party dressed up as the queen for the advertisement of an energy drink in 2015. Today echoes of the ill-fated 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 job who make the world economy spin.
“Marie Antoinette can be considered, in a certain way, one of the first influencers of history,” says the French historian Cécile Berly, a specialist in the 18th century and author of guillotined (Fund for Economic Culture), an essay about the women sentenced in 1793. The book investigates the scope of their smear campaign. “Without exempting her from her responsibility, the Revolution used tools of discredit and applied them with unprecedented violence. By 1789 she had already been the object of visceral hatred for a decade: she was the bad queen, the bad woman and the bad 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 fight for equality, but she does incarnate “a precedent of emancipation, by claiming her own spaces and participating in the emergence of a right to privacy.”
The current rereading of the character comes with certain corrections. For example, that the famous “Let them eat cake” is apocryphal, as Fraser already pointed out when publishing his biography in 2001. As the historian Colin Jones explains in the catalog of the London exhibition, this attribution was established decades after his death and would come from a “great princess” cited by Rousseau in his Confessions. The phrase prospered 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 weddings of millionaires and former presidents behind bars in a country mired in deficit and where one breathes the air of the end of the kingdom, is purely coincidental.