Review
Marie
Antoinette Style review: Forget the seedy sex addict slurs – and meet the real
classy, sassy queen
V&A,
London
From
smallpox headgear to fairytale gowns and self-modelled ‘breast cups’, this
lavish show reveals a very different person from the one depicted in the
libellous fantasies of the French revolutionary press
Jonathan
Jones
Wed 17
Sep 2025 00.01 BST
Marie
Antoinette had no luck. When fireworks were lit in Paris to celebrate the
Austrian princess’s marriage to the dauphin of France, a conflagration ensued,
the crowd stampeded and more than 130 people were killed – although rumour put
the number much higher. From the start, it seemed she was destined to be hated
by the French people and blamed for sufferings she didn’t even know existed.
By the
time the French Revolution had begun in 1789, Antoinette was demonised not only
as a lavish spender but a rampant sex addict who cuckolded the king.
Illustrations from 1790s pornographic booklets in the V&A’s epic show
graphically depict her making love to a guard and to one of her ladies in
waiting. By the time you get to these libellous prints, you can’t help feeling
their bullying nastiness. For you have got to know her. This show is a superb
lesson in how history can be understood through images and objects. It brings
you as close as it’s possible to get to the real Marie Antoinette.
She looks
back at you with unruffled calm in portraits by Élisabeth Vigée le Brun.
Antoinette’s patronage of this gifted painter immediately takes you into a very
different royal world from the misogynist fantasies of the revolutionary press:
a female-dominated circle where the queen’s fascination with fashion fed Vigée
le Brun’s art. She liked to sport striking headgear on top of colossal
hairstyles: her caps, or “poufs”, celebrated such events as the discovery of
smallpox vaccination. To mark a French naval victory she wore a hat with a ship
on top. But the style that inspired Vigée le Brun was a simple, rustic look. In
her portrait of the queen in a straw hat, Antoinette holds a pink rose, pausing
from her flower-arranging to look at us. It’s a shame they couldn’t pair it
with Vigée le Brun’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, which is not far away in the
National Gallery.
She was
demonised not only as a lavish spender but a rampant sex addict who cuckolded
the king
Antoinette
is downsizing here. Inspired by the Romantic movement, her hairstyles got
smaller in the late 1700s. She turned to nature as the people turned on her,
spending more time in her private retreat, the Petit Trianon, in the grounds of
Versailles. You can see a gold-trimmed armchair from this pastoral hideout and,
even more amazingly, a set of fake gardening tools that were props in the
pastoral dramas she performed at its theatre. The ideas of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who praised the state of nature and condemned civilised corruption,
are reflected in her “natural” lifestyle, except she couldn’t help express this
according to the codes and culture of the court – luxuriously.
Another
natural fashion in 18th-century France was for upper-class women to breastfeed
their own children, instead of employing a wetnurse. This ideal is celebrated
by Antoinette’s “breast cup”, a perfect porcelain simulacrum of a breast,
rumoured to have been personally modelled by the queen.
Revolutionaries
would say (and did say) that all this was a rich woman’s fantasy of naturalness
expressed in completely unnatural, consumerist ways. Yet she was just making
use of all the comforts of French upper-class culture. There is a ravishing
collection of painted fans here, each one a fluttering piece of pictorial art
featuring lovers, gods, or a satirical scene in which a hairdresser stands on a
ladder to work on a woman’s towering hairstyle.
As for
the clothes, they are straight out of a fairytale. The robe de cour (court
robe) that the Queen of Sweden wore for her wedding in 1774 is a glittering
silver dream beyond any Disney fantasy. This and other garments worn in the
18th century stand in a hall of mirrors, their invisible occupants haunting the
gallery. Intimate relics belonging to the queen herself include jewels, her
piano, her perfume bottles and pot pourri bowls. Versailles apparently stank.
The
revolution brought an end to fripperies. Truth was all – yet this too was
expressed in fashion. Designs for revolutionary dress show his-and-hers
patriotic costumes, including a Roman republican outfit. A depiction of the
Festival of the Federation in 1790 shows the royal family conforming to the new
ways. But by 1793, the guillotine beckoned.
And here
it is. A surviving part of a real guillotine from the revolution, with its
rotted black wood and still-sharp, still-usable blade has been lent by the
Madame Tussauds archive. It may have been the very machine that beheaded
Antoinette on the Place de la Concorde – then called the Place de la Révolution
– on 16 October 1793. A print shows the executioner holding up her head for the
crowd to see, blood streaming from her neck.
After
this, the reinvention of Antoinette in modern culture is explored, but it is
the least convincing part of the exhibition. There is a photo of Kate Moss in
“Marie Antoinette clothes”, and props from the film Marie Antoinette. All fine,
but in reality this is not a show about style. It is about a woman who lived
and died in the storm of history. Her final note from her death cell is here:
“Mon Dieu! Ayez pitié de moi!” (My God! Have pity for me!) How could you not?
Marie Antoinette Style is at the V&A,
London, from 20 September
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