How Marie Antoinette became the most fashionable queen in history

By Leah Dolan, CNN

London (CNN) — Marie Antoinette died over 230 years ago. But in the modern day, the teen queen’s presence remains widely felt.

A-listers from Kylie Jenner to Miley Cyrus have embodied her likeness for fashion magazines, wearing diaphanous frocks or towering wigs surrounded by a selection of teeth-rotting confectionery. Last year, Chappell Roan performed at the Lollapalooza music festival dressed as Marie Antoinette in a crimped wig and Rococo gown — reviving a pop star trope that began with Madonna at the 1990 MTV Awards. Fashion designers such as John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Vivienne Westwood and Alessandro Michele have all mined the royal for inspiration. For the 2016 Fenty x Puma collection, Rihanna — who is the global ambassador and creative director — imagined what the 18th century figure might wear to the gym. The last queen consort of France has even had her “beauty secrets” published in Vogue, in honor of her 262nd birthday.

Much like Marilyn Monroe or Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette has evolved beyond being a historical figure to become a concept. Her image is now shorthand for beauty, decadence, rebellion, and misogyny. This week, the memorialization continues at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, which is staging the UK’s first-ever exhibition on the fashionable queen.

“Marie Antoinette was a fashion and style icon in her own time, but there had never been an exhibition that really looked at that incredible legacy,” Sarah Grant, the exhibition’s curator, told CNN. Antoinette’s court was crowded with hairdressers, dressmakers and milliners, all working to create the lavish styles that defined the late 18th-century French fashion scene. Those trendsetting choices not only made Antoinette a prominent style icon, but also gave her the power to influence society — laying the groundwork for what one would consider “celebrity style” today.

At the V&A, visitors can wander through pastel-pink rooms and bear witness to 250 objects that piece together a picture of Antoinette’s life: From her dazzling jewels — seen publicly for the first time since her death, once packed up by the queen herself in 1791 as she attempted to flee France to avoid persecution — to countless watercolour fans, silk gowns and beaded slippers. Her favourite scents, such as the orris root, tuberose, violet and musk that she used to perfume herself in the morning, were recreated to immerse the audience in the pageantry of the 1700’s French court. But it wasn’t all sweet smelling roses: Before entering the crimson-walled room that features Antoinette’s stained prison chemise uniform, as well as the guillotine blade allegedly used to behead her, Grant conjured another, more pungent but equally familiar fragrance to the royal — the mildew, sewage and smells of the polluted Seine river, which ran near the prison cell she was held in for weeks.

Antoinette’s legacy isn’t entirely without controversy. During her reign, she was subject to gossip, ridicule and slander in revolutionary propaganda. Satirical cartoons painted her as sexually devious, assuming her failure to produce an heir was because of an unbridled lasciviousness. She has been depicted in various ridiculous forms — as a mythical half-human, half-bird creature; a rabid hyena; and a double-ended beast with King Louis XVI. For many today, Antoinette is remembered for her opulence and subsequent detachment from the strife of the French people during a time of immense poverty.

But the watershed moment for Antoinette in the courtroom of public opinion may have been Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography, and Sofia Coppola’s subsequent 2006 Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Kirsten Dunst, which presented a compelling and sympathetic — though not uncritical — portrayal of the former queen. Fraser’s account of Antoinette was “told through a female lens,” explained Grant, one that positioned her as a child bride married off for political advantages at the age of 14 — suddenly with the weight of an empire on her shoulders. “There was a lot of empathy,” Grant said, noting that the V&A exhibition “wouldn’t have been possible” without it.

And while Coppola’s movie took creative liberties, with its New Romantic soundtrack and custom-made Manolo Blahnik pumps, it brought Fraser’s research to new audiences. In the view of Hannah Strong, a film critic and the author of “Sofia Coppola: Forever Young,” the director — who is the daughter of celebrated filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola — may have “resonated” with the plight of Antoinette herself. “Marie Antoinette was this young woman who came from enormous privilege and was thrust into this life that she never chased herself,” Strong said. “I think (Coppola) really identifies with this idea of women in history who have been maligned or mistreated.”

The film was a point of entry to the world of Antoinette for the designer Jeremy Scott. “Sofia Coppola’s rendition is just so visually beautiful,” he recalled to CNN over the phone. “The colors, the bon-bons.” For Scott, the empathy captured by Dunst’s empathetic performance offered a different perspective of Antoinette. “I have a soft spot for her,” he said, laughing that he would have even aided her ill-fated attempt to escape from Paris. “I would have been like, ‘Girl, hide here!’”

Scott’s Fall-Winter 2020 Antoinette-inspired dresses, tiered gowns frosted like cakes and Rococo dresses shortened in to minis, designed for Moschino, the Italian fashion label where he was previously creative director, are on display in the exhibition. “That maximalism, that frivolousness, that panache, there’s a joy to it,” he said. “It’s fantasy and frivolity. To me that’s the backbone of fashion.”

Those patisserie-style frocks are exhibited alongside other modern-day interpretations of the queen’s impeccable wardrobe, from Milena Canonero’s Oscar-winning costumes for Coppola’s film to Galliano and Lagerfeld’s designs for Dior and Chanel, respectively. The result is an impressive sartorial tribute that maps Antoinette’s lasting impact, which Grant attributes to the simple fact that hers is a great story. “All of this plays out against one of the most seismic episodes in history, which is the French Revolution. So I think it’s this perfect storm: this tragic, doomed life and this fashionable, incredibly sparking personality,” she said.

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