V&A Museum to host exhibition on Marie Antoinette’s fashion

The V&A Museum will host the exhibition “Marie Antoinette Style.”

The exhibition will feature 250 objects, including loans which have never been outside of Versailles or France. It will include rare personal items from Marie Antoinette, including her silk slippers and jewels from her private collection. You will also be able to see costumes made for the screen, such as those from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.

A scent experience will re-create the scents of the French court and the perfume Marie Antoinette wore.

Sarah Grant, Curator of Marie Antoinette Style, said: “The most fashionable, scrutinised and controversial queen in history, Marie Antoinette’s name summons both visions of excess and objects and interiors of great beauty. The Austrian archduchess turned Queen of France had an enormous impact on European taste and fashion in her own time, creating a distinctive style that now has universal appeal and application. This exhibition explores that style and the figure at its centre, using a range of exquisite objects belonging to Marie Antoinette, alongside the most beautiful fine and decorative objects that her legacy has inspired. This is the design legacy of an early modern celebrity and the story of a woman whose power to fascinate has never ebbed. Marie Antoinette’s story has been re-told and re-purposed by each successive generation to suit its own ends. The rare combination of glamour, spectacle and tragedy she presents remains as intoxicating today as it was in the eighteenth century.”

The exhibition “Marie Antoinette Style” runs at the V&A South Kensington from 20 September 2025 to 22 March 2026. Tickets can be bought here.