London – V&A South Kensington, 20 September 2025 – 22 March 2026
Sponsored by Manolo Blahnik
The Victoria and Albert Museum opens its autumn season with Marie Antoinette Style — the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the most fashionable and controversial queen in history. Spread across Galleries 38 and 39, this immersive journey redefines the legacy of an icon whose influence on fashion, design, and popular culture has never faded.
Featuring over 250 objects, including exceptional loans from Versailles never before seen outside France, the exhibition traces how an Austrian archduchess became the world’s first modern celebrity. Visitors will encounter Marie Antoinette’s own silk slippers, jewels from her private collection, and even the final note she wrote before her death — intimate artefacts that illuminate both her humanity and her myth.
Curated by Sarah Grant, Marie Antoinette Style unfolds in four acts. Beginning in 1770, it charts the young queen’s creation of a distinctive visual identity through furniture, porcelain, fashion, and musical instruments that shaped European taste. The narrative then explores her transformation into a romanticised muse, resurrected through 19th-century “French Revival” style and later reinvented in the worlds of Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
In its final act, Marie Antoinette Re-Styled, the exhibition explodes into the contemporary — showcasing couture creations by Dior, Chanel, Moschino, Erdem, Vivienne Westwood and Valentino, alongside Manolo Blahnik’s shoes designed for Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning film Marie Antoinette. Through immersive design, theatrical lighting, and even a bespoke scent experience, the V&A evokes the sensorial splendour of Versailles while revealing the queen’s enduring power to inspire reinvention — from Rococo salons to fashion runways and pop-culture stages.
As Grant notes, “Marie Antoinette’s story has been re-told and re-purposed by each generation to suit its own ends. The rare combination of glamour, spectacle and tragedy she presents remains as intoxicating today as it was in the eighteenth century.”
This exhibition is not a mere homage to opulence — it’s a study in the invention of image, the politics of beauty, and the cultural afterlife of a woman whose name still shimmers between fascination and myth.
Tickets are now on sale at V&A
.