As the planet’s ruling class embraces displays of royal-adjacent wealth, a new exhibition about Marie Antoinette is opening at London’s V&A. Why is the French fashion icon suddenly back in vogue?
Marie Antoinette: the Fragonard cupcake who bankrupted France with her lust for fashion and diamonds, who bottle-fed pet lambs while her people starved. No matter that, in truth, her frocks and jewels were small fry in her country’s financial ruin; the optics, as we would say now, were terrible. So what if she never actually said “let them eat cake” – history is no match for a great soundbite. But while opulence hastened Marie Antoinette’s downfall, it has also brought her immortality. Only Cleopatra rivals her as the most glamorous queen in history.
Even as she was driven to the scaffold, an ignominious jerky ride by open ox cart through crowds of jeering Parisians, the last queen of France knew the power of fashion. Marie Antoinette had worn only black since the death of her husband nine months earlier, defying a Jacobin ban on the wearing of a colour associated with the monarchy. But on the morning of 16 October 1793, she dressed in a pristine white chemise, petticoat, dress and bonnet. The febrile fury of a hungry and angry people had already torn her reputation to shreds – she was denounced in the press as a whore, a child abuser, a barely human “she-wolf” – but knowing that all eyes, still, were on her clothes, she protested her innocence to the last in the best way she knew.
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