Centuries Before Instagram, Marie Antoinette Was the Original Influencer

The Victoria & Albert Museum is shining a new kind of light on Marie Antoinette, the final queen of France—not as the villainess of history books or Sofia Coppola’s pastel-flushed heroine, but as something more nuanced and enduring: a woman who understood, long before Instagram, that image was power.

Marie Antoinette Style, the V&A’s new exhibition, is the first in the U.K. devoted to the queen’s wardrobe and legacy, bringing together more than 250 rare objects, from gowns and diamonds to shoes and porcelain. “Her name summons both visions of excess and objects and interiors of great beauty,” says curator Sarah Grant. The show leans into that tension, reminding us that Antoinette’s closet has always been double-stitched: luxury and politics, self-invention and scapegoating, fantasy and fear.

The story begins at Versailles. Marie Antoinette arrived from Austria in 1770, a teenager navigating one of the most scrutinized courts in Europe. Clothing became her language. She championed French silk makers, elevated the chemise dress (scandalously simple compared to stiff court attire) and curated her private world at the Petit Trianon with as much calculation as any official portrait. Some of the most extraordinary loans underscore this balancing act: a towering embroidered court gown sits not far from a muslin dress meant for pastoral playacting; a diamond necklace gleams beside porcelain from her country retreat. Together, they show a queen scripting her own image in a society determined to write it for her.

If fashion was her stage, death only extended the performance. Executed in 1793 at the mere age of 37, she became an object of nostalgia, then fetish, then cinematic icon. The exhibition devotes entire sections to this afterlife: the 19th-century sentimentalization of her memory, the belle epoque’s rococo revival, art nouveau’s dreamy reinterpretations. By the 20th century, Antoinette had been remade so many times she might as well be a 2025 pop star. Designers mined her silhouette and excess: Dior’s New Look, Valentino’s frothy gowns, Moschino’s tongue-in-cheek Versailles, Vivienne Westwood’s punk provocation. Coppola’s 2006 film recast her as Millennial It girl. Couture, film costumes, and even Manolo Blahnik shoes appear in the show, blurring 18th-century Versailles with modern catwalks.

Grant emphasizes that Antoinette was a kind of celebrity in her own time: her likeness reproduced, her outfits scrutinized, her persona debated in pamphlets and portraits. She was an influencer before the concept existed, her sartorial choices both content and controversy. The exhibition also sets out to untangle the myth. That infamous “Let them eat cake”? It was never said. The excess so often pinned on her? It was more complicated when propaganda is considered. Foreign, female, fashionable. She was an easy scapegoat, vilified through the very clothes that empowered her.

Among the gowns and jewels are quieter relics: a note written before her execution, fragile shoes from Versailles, intimate possessions from prison. They sit beside portraits designed to project unassailable power—she bore the weight of monarchy and myth alike.

The V&A’s timing is sharp. In an era when celebrity culture and political spectacle blur together, Marie Antoinette feels more like a case study than a relic. What does it mean to be judged for an image you cannot fully control? How does fashion function as both empowerment and liability? How does myth (spread in pamphlets then, TikToks now) shape a legacy? Grant points out that her influence has been astonishingly continuous, from Versailles salons to couture runways. The show insists on complexity: her clothes were not just pretty things but acts of strategy, symbols of identity, even weapons.

By the final galleries, where Dior gowns glow and Coppola’s costumes are on full display, the paradox is clear. Marie Antoinette is everywhere—Pinterest boards, drag stages, luxury campaigns—yet always unknowable, recast by others. Style was never incidental to her story; it was the story. And if the V&A proves anything, it’s that dressing Marie Antoinette, then or now, is also a way of undressing ourselves, asking what we project onto women in power, and why the queen of fashion still feels so modern in her peril.

Marie Antoinette Style runs at the V&A South Kensington from September 20, 2025, through March 22, 2026.