One Fine Show: ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

I was in Paris during the Louvre heist, and though my alibi is firm, I never would have predicted the extent to which the robbery would capture the imagination of New Yorkers. The robbery inspired countless Halloween costumes and signage at last month’s marathon. I think people like to imagine an Ernst Blofeld-type figure, awaiting delivery of the gem so that he can admire them in a secret vault or put them on his cat or something. It’s since become clear that this was never about anything more than the skyrocketing price of gold. Still, you can’t blame people for craving a villain who puts style above all else.

Marie Antoinette was certainly one of those, and whether you love her or love to hate her, the recently opened exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, “Marie Antoinette Style,” is a must-see. It’s a fashion exhibition—not a historical show with a vast number of objects actually owned by her—but it recreates her world well. A facsimile of a necklace from the “affair of the diamond necklace,” for example, sits near other glittering jewelry that did belong to her.

It’s a glimpse into her life through the lens of how she chose to look. Her shoes were so delicate, you can tell she didn’t do much walking. She had so many dominoes that you find yourself wondering how there could possibly be a need for so many. My favorite objects in the exhibition were the gilded satin gardening tools from Petit Trianon, her make-believe Disney village at Versailles.

This is one of those “One Fine Shows” I had the pleasure of seeing in person, and I’m glad I did because there’s no way to convey the innovative exhibition design from a checklist. They don’t shy away from anything, which is first hinted at by a series of plastic busts that invite you to smell Marie Antoinette’s world through a series of holes at the base of the neck. The perfumes that flowed through her court were as bespoke and pleasing as the rest of her existence, but then the last one in the row is intensely foul. Is the machine broken? No, it’s simulating an 18th-century dungeon. This was near a room of pornographic cartoons about her from the time when it all started to go wrong, and it really snuck up on me. Next comes a red room and the last thing she ever wore: a thin prison smock.

So as not to end on a down note, the exhibition finishes with a host of haute couture inspired by her, from Manolo Blahnik, Vivienne Westwood and Christian Dior, with costumes by Sofia Coppola from Marie Antoinette. One risks a tummy ache with all that candy, but it does make you think about the power of a cohesive look. Our wealthiest today pride themselves on how they dress, but so many of them look like absolute shit. Marie Antoinette wasn’t much more villainous than her aristocratic contemporaries and managed to build a vibe that endured across the centuries. It’s hard to imagine many Instagram feeds ending up at the V&A.

More exhibition reviews

• Samuel Sarmiento’s Ceramics Channel Universal Memory in His U.S. Debut

• Robert Therrien’s Ordinary Uncanny at the Broad in L.A.

• Elia Arce’s ‘No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt)’ Is a Monument to Grief

• From Rejection to Revolution, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Charts the Rise of the Impressionists

• “Dirty Looks” at the Barbican Art Gallery Is Intentionally Messy