Some fashion icons pay the ultimate price. Marie Antoinette transformed the way French women dressed, popularising a looser, more flexible style and leading the charge for pastel colours and rococo patterns. But her expenditure on clothes and accessories at a time of widespread poverty provoked such fury that her execution in 1793 sparked an ironic craze for red ribbon chokers, a mordant nod to the guillotine. In recent decades her lavish spending has come to be seen more as patronage than preening. She took risks, too: when Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted her wearing a plain white muslin dress in 1783, it was considered so inappropriate that the artist was asked to remove it from view at the Salon and repaint it. The 250 objects in this exhibition include many of Marie Antoinette’s clothes and personal effects – including, most poignantly, a brief note she wrote on the day of her execution – as well as couture by the leading fashion houses inspired by the Queen of France (20 September–22 March 2026).
Find out more from the V&A’s website.
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