Marie Antoinette Style @ The V&A

I managed to get tickets to see Marie Antoinette Style on the same day as the Cartier exhibition, so after visiting that exhibition and having a cup of tea and a very nice slice of cake in the cafe I headed into my second event of the day. On display were a surprising amount of Marie Antoinette’s belongings as well as items contemporary to her life and items that were inspired by her life and fashion choices centuries after her execution.

After the French Revolution many of the royal family’s possessions were stolen, destroyed or sold at auction so it’s surprising that any of Marie Antoinette’s belongings survived at all. This is one of her shoes; in her early days at court she would receive four new pairs of shoes a week, no doubt endearing her further to the French peasantry.

The couple of items I was most surprised to see were those that relate to the so called Diamond Necklace Affair. I was familiar with the story because I’ve read a few books that mentioned it in passing but I’d never thought to follow up on what happened. The necklace was the most expensive ever made in France – all the diamonds in it come to an astonishing 2842 carats. Marie Antoinette had been offered it by the jewellers but refused. However a con artist by the name of Jeanne de la Motte tricked one of Marie Antoinette’s courtiers the Cardinal de Rohan into paying towards some of the necklace, believing that he was doing so for Marie Antoinette and to get back into her good graces. There was even a meeting at night where the Cardinal believed he was meeting Marie Antoinette (a prostitute in disguise!). When the Cardinal handed over the necklace to Jeanne she disappeared with it.

The plot was eventually uncovered and Jeanne ended up being branded as a thief with a hot iron but Marie Antoinette’s reputation never really recovered – the idea being that there was no smoke without fire and plenty of people by this point were happy to blame her for every scandal at court. It’s really from here that her downfall and that of her family began in earnest.

This is a replica of the necklace designed in the 1960s and on loan from Versailles. I actually think it’s pretty ugly myself!

And these are the Sutherland diamonds. De la Motte and her accomplices had the necklace broken up and brought to England. Some of the diamonds are believed to have ended up in this necklace which used to belong to the Sutherland family – Duchesses wore them to the coronations of Queen Victoria and George VI. They now belong to the V&A.

And the Anglesey Diamond Negligee Necklace also contains diamonds that were from the original necklace and were once owned by the Marchioness of Anglesey. It was worn to the coronation of George VI and Elizabeth II and is now in a private collection.

If you’re looking for some jewels that Marie Antoinette definitely wore here’s one of her diamond brooches and her pearl and diamond pendant, both dating from the 1770s. The brooches’ yellow diamond was added in the 19th century.

There were a few pieces of Marie Antoinette’s furniture on display but the one I particularly liked was her piano. It was made for her in 1787 by Sebastien Erard and bought back by the Erards at the revolutionary sale of the royal family’s possessions in 1792.

One thing I quite enjoyed was the busts like the one below. See the holes on the neck and the hair? Lean forward and you can get a whiff of the smells that Marie Antoinette preferred (I bought a book from the shop about her personal perfume maker which is proving interesting reading). My favourite was the Powder and Rouge – orris root, rose, lavender, tuberose, violet and musk. I was not keen on the last one, but then I wasn’t supposed to be as it was the smells that Marie Antoinette would have encountered whilst imprisoned before her execution!

Dresses abound of course, but no complete dress of Marie Antoinette’s has survived; this is a fragment of a dress that is marked as probably having belonged to her.

The dresses that are on display are contemporary to her time as queen.

The final section is all about the impact she had on fashion hundreds of years after her death, including a lot of pieces from Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film about Marie Antoinette.

Beautiful and glamorous there is also a tinge of sadness. There are several items on display from her last years, including a guillotine blade from the time (they can’t say for sure that it was the exact one that killed her), the clothing she was wearing at the time of her execution and the last thing she is known to have written, on a blank page of her prayer book.

My God, have pity on me! My eyes have no more tears to cry for you my poor children; adieu, adieu!

Marie Antoinette was 14 when she married the future King Louis XVI and was dead by the time she was 37.

Tickets cost £23 on weekdays (the price I paid) or £25 at the weekend. The exhibition ends on 22 March 2026 and as of writing there are plenty of slots free from January onwards.