Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), starring Kirsten Dunst, unfolds like a feature-length fashion film, a Ladurée-colored dreamscape of panniered gowns, lace fans, feathered hairpieces, and priceless jewels. Yet it’s designer footwear that steals the spotlight in this atemporal biopic, which contrasts the French queen’s notorious reputation with the relatable woman behind the crown. In a “I Want Candy”-scored retail therapy montage that wouldn’t look out of place on Sex and the City, the camera pans across a row of bejeweled and be-ribboned Manolos. It lingers on Marie Antoinette’s feet in a particularly irresistible pair of blueberry silk satin mules adorned with crystal buckles, with a pile of discarded shoes—including Converse high-tops—just visible. “I was thinking about bored women at Barneys and how they always perked up in the shoe section,” Coppola explains.
The Tourzel Habsburg mules are one of six sweet Manolo Blahnik designs for the film on view starting September 20 at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in the landmark Marie Antoinette Style exhibition celebrating the queen’s role as a proto-influencer and her lasting mark on fashion. “Shoes tell Marie Antoinette’s story, from mastering the ‘Versailles glide’ in high-heeled mules as a teenager to losing a shoe as she climbed to the guillotine,” says curator Dr. Sarah Grant. The exhibition showcases two rare surviving examples of this ill-fated Cinderella’s dainty size 36.5 footwear: a beaded pink silk mule and an ecru silk-and-kidskin pump trimmed with pleated ribbons.
Highlighting frayed silk-edge fringing, feminine bows, and decorative ruching, Blahnik’s handmade designs mirror the exquisite workmanship and passementerie done by royal shoemakers during Marie Antoinette’s reign. Throughout his five-decade-plus career, Blahnik has often worked in a deliciously Rococo style, both at his label and in theatrical runway collaborations with John Galliano. His love for all things 18th-century dates back even further, to his mother reading Stefan Zweig’s biography of Marie Antoinette to him as a bedtime story. All of which made him a shoo-in to work with Milena Canonero on her Oscar-winning costumes. “I thought that if Marie Antoinette were around, she would have asked Manolo for shoes,” Coppola says. “We all hovered around the boxes, excited to see what bonbons he sent.”
Shoes from Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette.
Coppola and Dunst on the set of Marie Antoinette.
To toast the exhibition’s debut, this fall Blahnik is offering a Marie Antoinette capsule collection of 12 new flavors reimagining the confections he first whipped up for Coppola’s Versailles. “It is the mood, the romance and the delicate balance between frivolity and elegance that I wanted to translate,” he says. The Montmedy pump and Palissot sandal are frosted with rosettes, much like the blue-and-white striped Mercy Artois heel admired by the queen and her confidante Princesse Lamballe (Mary Nighy) onscreen. Meanwhile, the raspberry Valoisette pump and Fontettes ballet flat, trimmed with dainty box pleats, recall the Ref. 0 court shoe, slipped onto the queen’s foot by a French maid—a sly nod to Guy Bourdin—as she samples frosting from a tiered cake in the opening tableau.
The capsule notably expands the film’s signature sugar-spun palette, introducing ticking stripes and lampas patterns in rich jewel tones inspired by Marie Antoinette’s furniture collection, courtesy of Blahnik’s longtime supplier, Claremont. While Coppola’s film closes with the March on Versailles at the dawn of the French Revolution, Blahnik now turns to the full arc of Marie Antoinette’s story. “For the film, pastels were divine; the pinks, lilacs, and pistachio greens perfectly express the playfulness of youth,” he explains. “For this collection, almost twenty years after the film came out (can you imagine!) I wanted to bring depth, and a touch of drama. I added richer hues like midnight blues and deep maroons to explore another side of Marie Antoinette with more intensity and even the melancholy she experienced in her wild and fascinating life.”
The Manolo Blahnik Marie Antoinette capsule is now available on manoloblahnik.com and exclusively in-store at Manolo Blahnik Madison Avenue and Manolo Blahnik Miami Design District.
