Reappraising Marie Antoinette

In 1783, a portrait of the Austrian-born French queen Marie Antoinette painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was removed from the Salon of that year on the grounds that it depicted the notorious sovereign in insufficiently extravagant attire. Dressed in a ‘pastoral’ straw hat and a simple billowing cream dress cut from muslin, the ensemble was a bold departure from the more restricted corsetry of Versailles fashions at the time and the court’s preference for sumptuous fabrics. In posing in such a daringly unstructured dress, which more approximated lingerie, the queen drew scorn from critics, who claimed that she was shunning France’s revered Lyon silk (then one of its most lucrative industries) and disrespecting royal protocols. The ensemble’s roomy arms and shoulders appeared to offer confirmation that the modish queen was hiding something up her sleeve. 

The more common lament about Marie Antoinette’s entanglement with fashion is that she was profligate and frivolous, spending at least 300,000 livres a year on costuming herself when the average French peasant earned only 700. (On account of her clothes-worshipping, she was accused of pushing France into bankruptcy, earning her the epithet ‘Madame Déficit’, among other slurs.) Now, a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London, ‘Marie Antoinette Style’, seeks to give more dimensionality to the brittle view of her as the one-trick or myopic ‘Queen of Fashion’ of popular imagination.

Though the show celebrates Marie Antoinette through the lens of self-ornamentation, it doesn’t only showcase her spectacularly scaffolded couture court gowns – swooning grands habits designed by ‘Minister of Fashion’ Rose Bertin – nor the pastel whimsies in wistfully washed-out, bonbon tones foremost in the cultural imaginary since Sofia Coppola’s 2006 titular cinematic portrayal of the fated monarch. This multisensory survey allows viewers to pore over some of Marie Antoinette’s most cherished props (her silk slippers and bejewelled hair combs), catch a whiff of her preferred perfume (recreated from her Trianon gardens) and observe modern runway pieces (by Gaultier, Westwood, Chanel) that pay homage to the original ‘material girl’. It shows Marie Antoinette not only as an avid adolescent clothes horse, but as a mourner, mother, collector, tastemaker, patron of the arts and, before her sensationally grisly execution at the hands of the new French Republic in 1793, a prisoner, who, until her last meticulously choreographed outfit of blindingly white petticoat and matching garters as her hair was cut to shreds before a crowd, brought consistent knowing attention to the art and act of getting dressed.  

I wasn’t sure what witnessing the show in London, a city which has always spliced royal reverence with punk subversion, might yield. The V&A’s location in the Royal Borough of Kensington provides a rather different setting from the Conciergerie in Paris – its dramatic ‘corridor of death’, where Marie Antoinette spent the last days of her life awaiting trial, was the morbid setting for a related exhibition in 2019. The show is also a departure from previous V&A productions appraising landmark cultural figures through the prism of their clothing, such as ‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’ in 2018 and ‘Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto’ in 2023–24, both of whom had towering artistic vocations alongside their penchants for self-adornment. 

Marie Antoinette is closer to the modern-day template of a celebrity for celebrity’s sake. 

Marie Antoinette, only 14 when she was propelled on to the world’s stage, is closer to the modern-day template of a celebrity for celebrity’s sake. Yet the crude objectification of her body – her bedsheets scrutinized for damning menstrual stains from the moment she entered Versailles as she effectively became the reproductive property of the French state – and the morass of baldly sexualized smear campaigns conspiring to incriminate her find chilling parallels in today’s disinformation campaigns against women politicians and the entrenched barriers to women’s full bodily autonomy across the world. Through the funhouse mirror that continues to distort Marie Antoinette’s legacy, many of the themes of this year’s Frieze Masters – connoisseurship, discovery, expertise, identity and the reinterpretation of art history through a contemporary lens – reverberate. 

Reading into Marie Antoinette’s biography while researching this piece, I was struck by how most commentators underscore the moments when she was ingloriously stripped of her armour: her brutal ‘handover’ ceremony from Austria to France, and her scandal-riven trial and execution. There is a voyeuristic charge in seeing icons divested. This show does Marie Antoinette the dignity of putting her back in her clothes.

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters magazine 2025 under the title ‘Madame Déficit’.

Further Information

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, The Regent’s Park, 15 – 19 October 2025. 

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_{Main image: Fragments of a court gown belonging to Marie Antoinette. Courtesy: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London}