Yesterday morning The V&A announced that its next blockbuster exhibition would focus on one of history’s most maligned figures: Marie Antoinette. Bringing together archival research with couture pieces inspired by the French queen, its curator Sarah Grant hopes not only to delve into her love of fashion and continuing influence on designers today, but also to debunk some of the myths surrounding her, not least that she bankrupted the French treasury and cruelly dismissed her starving subjects.
“We have a very specific idea of her, based on centuries of reinvention and storytelling,” explains cultural historian Dr Madeleine Pelling. “We’ve inherited a version we’ve seen on the internet and in films of her as being glamorous but also ignorant and thoughtless – someone out of touch with reality and interested in her own wealth but blind to the poverty around her.”
Even during her own lifetime, people sought to project an image onto Marie Antoinette to suit their own narratives. “In 18th-century France, image was everything,” continues Pelling. “As soon as she crossed the border from her native Austria into France, she was stripped of her Austrian clothes and recreated as a French monarch. People were literally dressing her as the person they wanted her to be [from the very beginning].”
The drivers of the French Revolution, in particular, used Marie Antoinette as a pawn, caricaturing her as a figure of dubious morals. “Critics of the monarchy accused her of multiple affairs, paedophilia, espionage, even bestiality,” explains royal historian Gareth Russell, who is working on a book about the fall of the French monarchy. “They attempted to attack and undermine the monarchy by presenting the queen as a figure of pornographic excess,” a depiction proliferated via pamphlets shared on the streets of Paris.
In the years following the French Revolution, there was a collective need to defend its principles (and the violence they precipitated), particularly among left-wing thinkers and writers, meaning that the conception of Marie Antoinette as an out-of-touch monarch was only burnished after her beheading. “Those who wanted to justify the revolution in later decades needed to render understandable the execution of a widowed mother, which is what Marie Antoinette was,” explains Russell. “When you depict Marie Antoinette as saying ‘let them eat cake’, you render her completely unsympathetic.” In the 20th century, meanwhile, she’s become an emblem of the dangers of abject consumerism. “As you enter the 1900s, Marie Antoinette as an icon of materialism starts to serve another purpose, almost in the same way as the sinking of The Titanic did,” explains Russell.
The trivialising of Marie Antoinette’s legacy was in evidence only a few weeks ago, when a headless puppet of the French queen was used as a punchline during the Opening Ceremony at the Paris Olympics. The move sparked backlash online – not only from monarchists and conservatives, but also feminists. “There has been quite a serious feminist defence of her from the 1980s onwards,” explains Russell. “It focuses particularly on how pornography was used to destroy her reputation, as well as this characterisation of her as unserious or apolitical.”
We will likely never know who the real Marie Antoinette was, but this exhibition will certainly go some way to dispelling the recurrent myths around her. “In my opinion, she was the victim of one of the first viral smear campaigns,” says Aricia Skidmore-Williams, an improv comedian and host of the popular podcasts Even the Royals and Even the Rich. “I think it’s important to remember that at her core, she was a stranger in a strange land, starting as a teenage girl. She absolutely had her faults, but so much of what was said about her was calculated by others looking for a scapegoat. History is written by the winners, and it’s only been recently that society has collectively pushed back on so many of these narratives.”
“She wasn’t a frivolous airhead; we know she was an avid reader, not just of novels and plays but philosophy and natural history,” adds Pelling. “She was interested in interiors and furniture as well as fashion, she liked playing instruments, and she commissioned a piano to be made for her. She wasn’t a mindless consumer, either. She was a patron of the arts, championing various artists and makers. And she wasn’t just a follower of the trends and fashions of the 18th century – she was driving them.”
Marie Antoinette Style will be at The V&A from 20 September 2025
