LONDON — The query of company looms giant within the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition concerning the final queen of France. The textual content of Marie Antoinette Type introduces her as “the most fashionable, scrutinised and controversial queen in history,” and the portrait mentioned to be most correct in likeness has been animated in a wall projection so her visage smirks and twinkles out at us. Listed below are her most intimate garments and belongings, an astonishing assortment of completely preserved tiny slippers, corsets, and jewels; objects marked along with her monogram within the caption point out that they belonged to her personally. However the wall texts’ slippery wording continuously evades confirming her company, regardless of extolling her “considerable influence as a patron of the arts” and describing her as a “style icon.”
Studying between the strains (and stitches), we glean an understanding of a political stage the place the younger queen’s sole goal in life was to face nonetheless at court docket and supply an inheritor to the king. “At 14, Antoinette made a dazzling entrance to the French court society at her wedding to the dauphin, the heir to the throne, wearing a shimmering gown of silver cloth,” we’re instructed. Its silk “was ordered from Paris at enormous expense by her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.” We study that she popularized types and had favourite materials; that she acquired an astonishingly high-quality 1770 jewellery casket by Martin Carlin, on view through mortgage from Versailles, as a marriage present. Concerning jewellery itself, the texts inform us that “during Antoinette’s reign innovative cuts enhanced the gems’ sparkle as never before.” In all of this, she is a passive agent. Surrounding items she owned are examples of wallpaper model and fabulous new ranges of frippery in wigs and hairstyling. We’re introduced with more and more hilarious hair designs, together with one named “Triumph of Liberty” within the form of a ship, recorded in a 1778 drawing and contextualized as “the most famous hairstyle associated with Antoinette.” The closest she will get to precise company on this exhibition is after we study that she landscaped the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles and redesigned its inside.
Unknown maker, Gown a la Francaise (1775–80, altered 1870–1910)
Look solely to the wince-inducing corsetry (the width of my neck, it appears) and the astounding creativity amongst costume makers, jewelers, and craftsmen on the time, which stuffs the primary room. It’s clear that her social function left no room (actually) for something aside from fulfilling duties of dynastic heir-making and adorning her very public house to be as sumptuously fairly as attainable. The truth that the primary portrait we encounter — with its girlish face of no determinate age nor figuring out function — is taken into account her best likeness signifies that she was by no means actually thought-about an individual whose actual visage was essential to document. In brief, we aren’t any nearer to understanding who she actually was.
Compounding this lack of historic artifact about Antoinette’s true self is lead curator Sarah Grant’s reluctance to underpin the show with historic and sociopolitical background. It could be that there’s merely no extant proof from which to construct an concept of her persona — maybe she was by no means afforded one. Or it might be that when specializing in model, who wants to listen to about nasty outdated revolutionary historical past anyway? The exhibition is sponsored by Manolo Blahnik and exhibits off a beautiful and ingenious little bit of stage design. The primary half is all glittery low lighting, pink scalloped wall designs, and ambient music designed by an outfit (sorry) referred to as Father that wouldn’t sound misplaced in an ASMR video. The latter is pastel greens and articulated phases that showcase the huge historic expanse of trend influenced by her “style” within the subsequent centuries through clothes by designers from Galliano to Chanel to, in fact, Manolo Blahnik along with his well-known Antoinette heel. A slightly enjoyable inclusion is mock busts full of potpourri that one can lean in towards and whiff.
Unknown maker, Gown a la francaise worn a la polonaise (in Polish trend) (c. 1775)
Demarking these two halves of the exhibition is a blood-red coloured passage resulting in an antechamber containing a contemporaneous instance of a French guillotine (cool!) and pictures of her severed head (macabre!). The curators had an entire delivery canal of wall house with which to clarify the historic and political machinations that may clarify why she got here to be executed (i.e. the background to that little factor referred to as the Revolution). Can we get it? Nope.
The actual triumph of this present is conservation. Even the within of the extant sneakers from the period haven’t a blemish nor tear. The presence of contemporaneous robes in stupendously good situation are well worth the admission worth alone. Many are from the V&A’s assortment, however the silver robe of Duchess Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta just like that worn by Antoinette at her wedding ceremony, loaned from the Royal Armoury in Stockholm, is extraordinary. No much less exceptional are the attire by Moschino designed to appear like cake. By way of this timeline of trend designs from Antoinette’s age as much as the current day, we are able to see how the queen’s model has reverberated within the type of gentle and ethereal motifs in pastel hues; decadence and ornament; excessively fluffy trains, hair, and poufs. But Antoinette stays identified solely by these cyphers. Historical past has by no means actually identified her as an individual, and that isn’t about to alter right here.
Set up view of Marie Antoinette Type that includes designs by John Galliano
Joseph Ducreux, “Marie Therese Louise de Savoie, princess de Lamballe” (1778)
Marie Antoinette Type continues on the Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington (Cromwell Street) via March 22, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Grant.
