Marie Antoinette Style at the V&A

What Fashion, Interiors and Timeless Design Can Teach Us

In the world of heritage, fashion and interiors often intersect in surprising ways. The Marie Antoinette Style exhibition, at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, illustrates this beautifully.

Far from being just a fashion show, it’s a deep dive into how one figure’s aesthetic sensibility shaped European taste for centuries, and continues to resonate in design today.

And as if to demonstrate the popularity of the subject, this much-anticipated exhibition has already sold-out, despite running until 22nd March.

A Queen of Style

Marie Antoinette wasn’t simply a queen. She was arguably history’s earliest style influencer. From her arrival in France as a young Austrian archduchess to her reign at Versailles, her choices in dress, decoration and presentation both reflected and shaped the cultural currents of her day. The V&A exhibition brings together over 250 objects, including rare personal items (such as her silk slippers and jewels), period works and contemporary reinterpretations, revealing just how intertwined fashion and interiors were in the late eighteenth century.

Her fashion was more than flamboyant costume: it was a form of communication. The silks, pastel hues, delicate embroideries and architectural gowns that defined her wardrobe mirrored broader aesthetic principles of her age, principles that would also inform decorative schemes, furniture design and taste in the decorative arts across Europe.

Design Beyond the Dress

What makes this exhibition especially compelling for lovers of interiors and heritage spaces is how it illustrates style as a holistic idea. Marie Antoinette’s aesthetic wasn’t limited to clothing: it extended into environments.

At Versailles’ Petit Trianon, her private retreat, she surrounded herself with softer, lighter interiors that contrasted with the formality of the grand palace. Pastel walls, delicate textiles, intimate furnishings and a playful flirtation with rustic motifs in the queen’s Hameau (a model farm) all demonstrate an approach to space that feels remarkably modern in its pursuit of comfort, personality and narrative.

This immersive connection between dress and setting echoes through the V&A’s galleries: rooms are curated so that textiles, decorative objects and historical imagery converse with fashion pieces, revealing how atmosphere and adornment together shape experience.

From Rococo to Runway

The final sections of the exhibition reveal how Marie Antoinette’s style continues to ripple through design culture. Contemporary fashion houses, including Dior, Chanel, Moschino, Vivienne Westwood and Valentino, are represented with runway couture that nods to her legacy. Film costumes from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and avant-garde reinterpretations further show how her aesthetic evolves with each generation.

For interior designers and homeowners alike, this enduring influence is a powerful reminder: great design often reaches beyond its own era, inspiring reinterpretation and adaptation. Whether it’s the soft palette of a living room, the choice of a floral motif in upholstery, or the decoration of a mantelpiece, echoes of historical style, like those of Marie Antoinette’s world, can inform spaces that feel both rooted in tradition and alive in the present

What it Offers us Today

For those of us passionate about heritage homes and thoughtful design, Marie Antoinette Style offers more than spectacle. It encourages us to think about:

Aesthetic narratives: how a coherent visual language across dress, objects and space creates emotional resonance.
Historical continuity: how past ideas influence present taste and how we incorporate them in contemporary homes.
Storytelling through design: how interiors, like a wardrobe, can express identity, mood and cultural context.

In this way, the exhibition invites us to see fashion and interiors not as separate worlds but as parallel lenses through which we experience beauty, identity and history.