Let Them Wear Couture: London’s V&A Dazzles With a Maximalist Celebration of Marie Antoinette
A Teen Queen Turned Eternal Muse
London — More than two centuries after the guillotine fell, Marie Antoinette’s power over fashion still feels alive, perfumed, and sugar-dusted. She may have died at 37, but the teen queen of Versailles has outlived every regime change as a living aesthetic: part beauty symbol, part political scapegoat, part pop-culture shorthand. Kylie Jenner, Miley Cyrus and Chappell Roan have all slipped into her silhouette; Madonna set the trope ablaze at the 1990 MTV VMAs with her fan-dancing baroque bedroom “Vogue” performance. Designers from John Galliano to Vivienne Westwood to Rihanna have mined her iconography, and even her “beauty secrets” have been revisited in Vogue on the anniversary of her birth.
Now the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is staging the UK’s first-ever exhibition dedicated to the fashionable queen — and it’s as much a sensory experience as a history lesson.
From Versailles to South Kensington: A Feast for the Senses
Curated by Sarah Grant, the exhibition isn’t a hushed history display. Visitors wander pastel-pink rooms scented with orris root, tuberose, violet and musk — the fragrances Antoinette herself favored. They pass 250 objects spanning courtly glamour and grim downfall: dazzling jewels she hastily packed before her escape attempt in 1791; watercolor fans, beaded slippers, and silk gowns; even the stained chemise from her prison cell. Before entering a crimson chamber displaying the guillotine blade allegedly used in her execution, guests are met with the recreated smell of the polluted Seine — a pungent counterpoint to the perfumed salons of Versailles.
It’s a 360-degree immersion into her world: pageantry, perfume, and ultimately peril.
Designers, Divas, and the Queen’s Second Act
What makes Antoinette so irresistible to modern creatives? “She was a fashion and style icon in her own time, but there had never been an exhibition that really looked at that incredible legacy,” Grant told CNN. Her court brimmed with hairdressers, milliners and dressmakers shaping the late-18th century’s most lavish looks — the blueprint for today’s celebrity style machine.
The V&A pays homage to that lineage with a “hall of Maries”: Galliano’s Dior couture evoking Rococo finery and piled-high hair; Milena Canonero’s Oscar-winning costumes from Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film; Lagerfeld and Westwood’s reimaginings; Rihanna’s Fenty x Puma mash-up of court dress and athleisure. Jeremy Scott’s Moschino Fall-Winter 2020 “frosted frocks” — tiered gowns shortened to minis, looking like edible patisserie — add a wink to the misattributed “let them eat cake.” “That maximalism, that frivolousness, that panache — there’s a joy to it,” Scott said. “To me that’s the backbone of fashion.”
The Queen Behind the Myth
Yet the show also threads empathy through the excess. Antoinette was a 14-year-old Austrian princess shipped to France for dynastic purposes, a child bride turned symbol of national anger. For decades, satirical cartoons painted her as a hyena, a bird, a sexual deviant. Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography and Coppola’s 2006 film reframed her as complex, not cartoonish, and opened the door for today’s softer interpretations. “All of this plays out against one of the most seismic episodes in history, which is the French Revolution,” Grant explained. “It’s this perfect storm: a tragic, doomed life and this incredibly sparkling personality.”
Why It Matters Now
The V&A exhibition is more than a spectacle of silks and jewels. It’s a meditation on how style can both liberate and ensnare, elevate and vilify — a mirror for our own era of influencer culture and instant backlash. Antoinette’s legacy shows that fashion is never just about clothes; it’s about power, identity, and narrative.
As visitors exit the final room, moving from pastel salons to the shadow of the guillotine, they’re left with an image not just of a doomed queen but of a woman whose wardrobe became a battleground. In London this season, Marie Antoinette isn’t just a ghost from history. She’s the star of the runway once again — and perhaps the most relatable influencer of them all.
