LONDON.- V&A South Kensington opened Marie Antoinette Style the UK’s first exhibition on the French queen Marie Antoinette. The exhibition explores 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.

250 objects, including exceptional loans from the Château de Versailles never before seen outside France, are 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 considers 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 traces 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 are 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 features 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 comes to life and sets the stage for over 250 years of style reimagined again and again. A scent experience re-creates scents of the court, and the perfume favoured by the Queen herself.

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.”