London
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Marie Antoinette died over 230 years in the past. But in the modern-day, the teen queen’s presence stays broadly felt.
A-listers from Kylie Jenner to Miley Cyrus have embodied her likeness for style magazines, sporting diaphanous frocks or towering wigs surrounded by a choice of teeth-rotting confectionery. Last 12 months, Chappell Roan carried out at the Lollapalooza music competition dressed as Marie Antoinette in a crimped wig and Rococo robe — reviving a pop star trope that started with Madonna at the 1990 MTV Awards. Fashion designers equivalent to John Galliano, Karl Lagerfeld, Vivienne Westwood and Alessandro Michele have all mined the royal for inspiration. For the 2016 Fenty x Puma assortment, Rihanna — who’s the international ambassador and artistic director — imagined what the 18th century determine may put on to the gymnasium. The final queen consort of France has even had her “beauty secrets” revealed in Vogue, in honor of her 262nd birthday.
Much like Marilyn Monroe or Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette has developed past being a historic determine to turn into an idea. Her picture is now shorthand for magnificence, decadence, rebel, 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, advised NCS. Antoinette’s courtroom was crowded with hairdressers, dressmakers and milliners, all working to create the lavish kinds that outlined the late 18th-century French style scene. Those trendsetting decisions not solely made Antoinette a outstanding fashion icon, but additionally gave her the energy to affect society — laying the groundwork for what one would contemplate “celebrity style” right now.
At the V&A, guests can wander by way of pastel-pink rooms and bear witness to 250 objects that piece collectively an image of Antoinette’s life: From her dazzling jewels — seen publicly for the first time since her demise, as soon as packed up by the queen herself in 1791 as she tried to flee France to keep away from persecution — to numerous watercolour followers, silk robes and beaded slippers. Her favorite scents, equivalent to the orris root, tuberose, violet and musk that she used to fragrance herself in the morning, had been recreated to immerse the viewers in the pageantry of the 1700’s French courtroom. But it wasn’t all candy smelling roses: Before getting into the crimson-walled room that options Antoinette’s stained jail chemise uniform, in addition to the guillotine blade allegedly used to behead her, Grant conjured one other, extra pungent however equally acquainted perfume to the royal — the mildew, sewage and smells of the polluted Seine river, which ran close to the jail cell she was held in for weeks.
Antoinette’s legacy isn’t totally with out controversy. During her reign, she was topic to gossip, ridicule and slander in revolutionary propaganda. Satirical cartoons painted her as sexually devious, assuming her failure to supply an inheritor was due to an unbridled lasciviousness. She has been depicted in varied ridiculous kinds — as a legendary half-human, half-bird creature; a rabid hyena; and a double-ended beast with King Louis XVI. For many right now, Antoinette is remembered for her opulence and subsequent detachment from the strife of the French individuals throughout a time of immense poverty.
But the watershed second for Antoinette in the courtroom of public opinion might have been Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography, and Sofia Coppola’s subsequent 2006 Oscar-winning movie adaptation starring Kirsten Dunst, which introduced a compelling and sympathetic — although not uncritical — portrayal of the former queen. Fraser’s account of Antoinette was “told through a female lens,” defined Grant, one which positioned her as a baby bride married off for political benefits at the age of 14 — all of a sudden with the weight of an empire on her shoulders. “There was a lot of empathy,” Grant mentioned, noting that the V&A exhibition “wouldn’t have been possible” with out it.
And whereas Coppola’s film took inventive liberties, with its New Romantic soundtrack and custom-made Manolo Blahnik pumps, it introduced Fraser’s analysis to new audiences. In the view of Hannah Strong, a movie critic and the writer of “Sofia Coppola: Forever Young,” the director — who’s the daughter of celebrated filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola — might 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 mentioned. “I think (Coppola) really identifies with this idea of women in history who have been maligned or mistreated.”
The movie was a degree of entry to the world of Antoinette for the designer Jeremy Scott. “Sofia Coppola’s rendition is just so visually beautiful,” he recalled to NCS over the telephone. “The colors, the bon-bons.” For Scott, the empathy captured by Dunst’s empathetic efficiency supplied a unique perspective of Antoinette. “I have a soft spot for her,” he mentioned, laughing that he would have even aided her ill-fated try to flee from Paris. “I would have been like, ‘Girl, hide here!’”
Scott’s Fall-Winter 2020 Antoinette-inspired attire, tiered robes frosted like desserts and Rococo attire shortened in to minis, designed for Moschino, the Italian style label the place he was beforehand inventive director, are on show in the exhibition. “That maximalism, that frivolousness, that panache, there’s a joy to it,” he mentioned. “It’s fantasy and frivolity. To me that’s the backbone of fashion.”
Those patisserie-style frocks are exhibited alongside different modern-day interpretations of the queen’s impeccable wardrobe, from Milena Canonero’s Oscar-winning costumes for Coppola’s movie to Galliano and Lagerfeld’s designs for Dior and Chanel, respectively. The result’s a formidable sartorial tribute that maps Antoinette’s lasting impression, which Grant attributes to the easy undeniable fact that hers is a good 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 mentioned.