MARIE ANTOINETTE STYLE

A love letter of a newsletter...

As someone prone to falling in love with inanimate objects and gushing over beauty, I typically attempt to maintain a sense of restraint my reviews of fashion exhibitions, lest I spend too long singing the praises of a single stitch. There are times, however, when critical distance must be thrown out the window and one’s heartstrings laid bare. The V&A’s Marie Antoinette Style is the apex of such an occasion.

Like many readers of this newsletter, I am an impassioned fan of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette, a film sparked one of the most enduring obsessions of my life: Marie Antoinette herself. (If you haven’t read Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey, which inspired Coppola to make her movie, I cannot recommend it more highly!). My love for Rococo dress in Marie Antoinette’s court is one of the predominant forces that led me to study fashion history, the mythology that surrounds Marie Antoinette’s reign has indelibly shaped the way I approach all stories of the past, and, as is the case for many other women with a penchant for frocks and frippery, I’ve always found a sort of deluded cross-historical kinship with Marie Antoinette herself. (I also write about Marie Antoinette and the unconventional habits of the Rococo court often. Here’s a really incredible publication all about Rococo style that I contributed to, a piece about the 18th century penchant for pink hair, and a tutorial on how to recreate Marie Antoinette’s infamous—and likely falsified—ship hairdo).

When the V&A announced that they would be putting on an exhibition honouring Marie Antoinette and her epic influence upon the course of fashion, I knew I had to be there. I was almost thwarted by a snowstorm, but last week I managed a mere 12 hours in London, most of which I spent at Marie Antoinette Style. While most of the press that surrounded the exhibit featured Rococo-inspired works by John Galliano and Manolo Blahnik, I was absolutely delighted to find that the majority of the exhibition was comprised of garments and objects from the 18th century. Even late on a freezing Friday night, the exhibition was packed, and I found myself wondering what Marie Antoinette would have to say about the hoardes of people gathered to view her items. I then quickly dismissed the thought because I highly doubt she’d be surprised. She made her life worthy of observation, and she had faith in the enduring power of her taste.

Given the impossibility of an unbiased review in this instance, I would instead like to offer up some of my favourite pieces from Marie Antoinette Style with you here, coupled with some of my obsessive Marie Antoinette trivia and new research included in the show. These are objects I never thought that I would get to see in my life, let alone find so many of them housed in a singular exhibition… They are too good not to share.

And, needless to say, if you can make it before the exhibit closes on March 22nd, you must!

One of the items I was most excited to see: a wardrobe book of all the silks Marie Antoinette ordered in 1782. The book provides an unbelievably intimate look at the tastes and habits of Marie Antoinette. We can see written here that she wore a gown in pale pink silk to the château de Marly and a gown in cream silk (the sample since removed) trimmed by Rose Bertin for Easter.

This is one of the items that I truly cannot believe I got to lay eyes upon. Marie Antoinette and her sister-in-law, the comtesse d'Artois, both wore silver wedding dresses. This is a 1774 copy of the dress worn by the comtesse in 1773. Marie Antoinette's wedding dress does not survive. It was created before her arrival in France in 1770, and an error in measurement meant that she could not lace the back of the gown fully. She was made to walk down the aisle with her dress open, an incident that left her so flush with embarrassment that she allegedly asked to never see the dress again.