Marie Antoinette Style: V&A exhibition explores the last Queen of France—extravagance, scandal, and the guillotine

London — The UK’s first major exhibition devoted to France’s last queen opens this weekend at the Victoria and Albert Museum, offering a portrait of Marie Antoinette that balances glittering fashion with a reputation built on scandal and revolution.

Marie Antoinette Style runs for six months from Sept. 20 at the V&A in South Kensington. The show assembles a range of objects, from a guillotine blade to 18th‑century pornography and the pouf à l’inoculation, a lavish feathered millinery honoring King Louis XVI’s smallpox vaccination. Major pieces from her jewellery collection, among the largest for any French queen, are shown alongside intimate items used to narrate her life of public spectacle and private concern.

One of the more powerful objects is a note written in the early hours before she faced the guillotine at Place de la Concorde in Paris on October 16, 1793, at age 37. The note, yellowed with time, reads: "My God, have mercy on me! My eyes have no more tears to cry for you, my poor children. Farewell, farewell!"

The exhibition revisits rumors of the queen’s extravagance and alleged infidelities, including the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which historians say contributed to the erosion of popular support and the onset of revolution. The show also foregrounds the era’s fashion culture, noting Versailles as the center of eccentric style—powdered wigs, jewel‑encrusted gowns, and lavish coiffures that could reach four feet in height and feature peacocks, fruit, and even miniature ships.

A gala preview drew a mix of fashion, film and design luminaries, underscoring the show’s aim to present Marie Antoinette as more than a one‑dimensional symbol of excess. Guests included Manolo Blahnik, Sofia Coppola, and Lady Amanda Harlech, reflecting contemporary interest in the queen’s enduring appeal as a cultural icon.

Curated by historian Dr. Sarah Grant, the exhibition seeks to cast the queen in a more nuanced light. While popular lore often caricatures her as extravagantly wasteful, the show situates her within a dynastic system strained by debt, famine, and political crisis. It emphasizes how a teenager betrothed to Louis XVI at 14 navigated a court culture that prized spectacle even as financial collapse shadowed the nation.

Born Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria in 1755, she became Marie Antoinette upon her arranged marriage to the French crown prince, Louis-Auguste, who would become Louis XVI. The union, meant to seal a Franco‑Austrian alliance, brought the young bride into a world of courtly display, where jewelry rivaled the crown itself in ceremonial importance. Her jewelry collection grew to be the most extensive of any French queen, valued for its grandeur and its role in fashioning a public image that could charm or infuriate in equal measure.

The exhibition also revisits the diamond necklace affair, a scandal that centered on a pricey necklace that both the queen and her associates, through misdirection and deception, became entangled with. Although historians today point to Marie Antoinette’s innocence in the necklace plot, the affair helped stamp an image of royal decadence onto her reputation and fueled revolutionary tensions. In a broader sense, the show argues that the queen’s life intersected with a broader cultural shift where public fascination with celebrity, adornment, and personal drama intersected with political upheaval.

The public record places her capture in Paris in 1791 as revolutionary forces pressed the monarchy toward collapse. Nine months after her husband’s execution, she was tried on charges that historians now view as exaggerated. On October 16, 1793, she was executed by guillotine at the Place de la Concorde, her death marking a brutal culmination of a life lived under relentless scrutiny. The show’s display of her final note, written in the quiet hours before that fate, anchors the human dimension of a life otherwise framed by spectacular attire and dynastic politics.

Marie Antoinette Style aims to illuminate not only the glamour of her courtly life but also the vulnerabilities and pressures that accompanied a queen who, in life and death, became a powerful symbol of a tumultuous era. By juxtaposing lavish fashion with historical scandals and the harsh realities of revolution, the exhibition invites visitors to reassess a figure who helped shape the archetype of modern celebrity while remaining a central figure in one of Europe’s most dramatic chapters of history.