Marie Antoinette Style: the penultimate weekend in the V&A
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The exhibition ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington is drawing to a close within the final stretch of March.
It has been running since 20th September 2025, and finishing on the 22nd March, it is comprised of around 250 objects that are replicas of, or the belongings of the last queen of France before her execution in 1793.
The exhibition ranges from a wedding dress almost perfectly alike to her own; the queen’s original order book for dress materials; the loaned, celebrated portrait of Marie-Antoinette à la rose by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun; and the guillotine that is believed to have been used to execute her.
With the revival of the culture of Marie Antoinette, and the undeniable effect she had on changing fashions in France and both globally now, the exhibition is very popular.
It provokes endless conversation and debates about the unfortunate timing of her reign, and the troubles that lay beneath the crown.
One begins, through the weaving maze of exhibits, to learn of the propaganda used against the queen in times of financial crisis and the poor harvests of the year 1789 that eventually turned the country against the royals.
And above all, Marie Antoinette was a woman - an Austrian woman, foreign in the country.
She was heavily condemned for rumours of participating in sexual activities with both men and women; eradicating any credibility she held, and dehumanising her for any and every action.
The museum exhibit is highly educational, and leads people away from the fragments of information we once knew about the last reigning couple of France, and more towards the truth of it all, and how it unfolded so rapidly.
One of the most emotive parts of the exhibition was seeing a grand portrait of Marie Antoinette and two of her children, Marie Thérèse and Louis Joseph (her eldest son), and then her final days alone and imprisoned, stripped of her children.
The exhibition is as grand as Marie Antoinette’s dresses, and evokes unprecedented emotions for a queen seen as traitorous in her time.
