Marie Antoinette's style is the focus of the first solo exhibition on the Queen in the United Kingdom.

The unmistakable style of Marie Antoinette, the guillotined queen consort of France and Navarre (1755-1793), will be the focus of a first-ever solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, featuring 250 original objects and recreations, London's Victoria & Albert Museum announced Tuesday.

Some of them from the Palace of Versailles (northern France), where Marie Antoinette resided from her marriage to Louis XVI in 1770 until the outbreak of the French Revolution , textile and decorative pieces that belonged to her and that are still today a symbol of the excesses that surrounded her will be exhibited.

"This is the design legacy of an early modern celebrity and the story of a woman whose power to fascinate has never diminished," said exhibition curator Sara Grant.

The exhibition, which opens to the public on September 20, will feature fragments of some of her dresses , silk shoes, and some of the jewels of the queen who was sentenced to the guillotine for treason in October 1793, nine months after her husband.

Some of these items have never left France, such as certain personal accessories, a case, or the queen's dinner service from the Petit Trianon, one of the palace's chambers.

It will also feature an olfactory experience through recreations of the smells that were present in the French court at that time or the perfume that Marie Antoinette is presumed to have used .

In addition, a contemporary take on the Queen's style will be offered through current designs from renowned fashion houses such as Moschino, Dior, Chanel, Erdem, Vivienne Westwood, and Valentino. Tickets for the exhibition, which can be purchased on the Victoria & Albert Museum website, will go on sale tomorrow, Tuesday, June 17, 2025.

Marie Antoinette was born in Vienna in 1755, the daughter of the Austrian Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa. In May 1770, at the age of fourteen, she married Louis XVI of France.

Marie Antoinette's fate was sealed from the moment she was married to Louis XVI, a husband she never loved and with whom she was deeply bored. Accused of being frivolous, wasteful, and capricious, she never managed to win the affection of the people, unable as she was to understand the plight of the underprivileged classes.

The press of the time was merciless: it portrayed her as a mediocre, libertine, and unpleasant figure, who sought in secret what she could not find in the king's bed.

By the time attempts were made to discredit the sources who had compiled the list of her alleged lovers and spread increasingly scandalous stories, it was too late. The French Revolution had broken out, the monarchs were captured in their escape attempt, and, finally, the guillotine ended the lives of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.