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V&A to Open ‘Marie Antoinette Style,’ the First UK Exhibition Dedicated to the Most Fashionable Queen in History

Posted on September 19, 2025

Opening in September 2025 at V&A South Kensington, Marie Antoinette Style will be the UK’s first exhibition on the French queen Marie Antoinette. The exhibition will explore the origins and countless revivals of the style shaped by the most fashionable queen in history. A fashion icon in her own time, and an early modern ‘celebrity’, the dress and interiors modelled and adopted by the ill-fated Queen of France in the final decades of the eighteenth century have had a lasting influence on over 250 years of design, fashion, film and decorative arts. Tickets for the exhibition go on sale today.

250 objects, including exceptional loans from the Château de Versailles never before seen outside France, will go on display including historical and contemporary fashion, alongside audio visual installations and immersive curation to explore how and why Marie Antoinette, the person, has provided a constant source of inspiration. The exhibition will also consider afresh the legacy of a complex figure whose style, youth and notoriety have all contributed to her timeless appeal. International loans will be displayed alongside key objects from the V&A’s own collection.

The exhibition will trace the cultural impact of the Marie Antoinette style, and her ongoing inspiration for leading designers and creatives, from Sofia Coppola and Manolo Blahnik to Moschino and Vivienne Westwood. On display will be exceptionally rare personal items owned and worn by Marie Antoinette including richly embellished fragments of court dress, the Queen’s own silk slippers, and jewels from her private collection. Other highlight objects which have never left Versailles or France before, including personal effects such as the queen’s dinner service from the Petit Trianon, her accessories and intimate items from her toilette case. The exhibition will also feature contemporary clothing including couture pieces by designers such as Moschino, Dior, Chanel, Erdem, Vivienne Westwood and Valentino and costumes made for screen, such as for Sofia Coppola’s Oscar winning Marie Antoinette staring Kirsten Dunst, as well as shoes designed by Manolo Blahnik for the film.

Marie Antoinette shaped not just the fashion, design, interiors, gardens, fine and decorative arts of her own time but has continued to exert an influence over more than two and a half centuries of graphic and decorative arts, fashion, photography, film and performance. Through theatrical staging and sensory experiences, the excessive, lavish and feminine style will come to life and set the stage for over 250 years of style reimagined again and again. A scent experience will re-create scents of the court, and the perfume favoured by the Queen herself.