Marie Antoinette Style review: Forget the seedy sex addict slurs – and meet the real classy, sassy queen | Exhibitions

Marie Antoinette had no luck. When fireworks have been lit in Paris to rejoice the Austrian princess’s marriage to the dauphin of France, a conflagration ensued, the group stampeded and greater than 130 folks have been killed – though hearsay put the quantity a lot larger. From the beginning, it appeared she was destined to be hated by the French folks and blamed for sufferings she didn’t even know existed.By the point the French Revolution had begun in 1789, Antoinette was demonised not solely as a lavish spender however a rampant intercourse addict who cuckolded the king. Illustrations from 1790s pornographic booklets within the V&A’s epic present graphically depict her making like to a guard and to one in all her women in ready. By the point you get to those libellous prints, you may’t assist feeling their bullying nastiness. For you’ve got to know her. This present is an outstanding lesson in how historical past will be understood by way of photos and objects. It brings you as shut because it’s potential to get to the true Marie Antoinette.Personally modelled by the queen? … a porcelain cup within the form of a breast. {Photograph}: Martine Beck-Coppola/Grand Palais Rmn (Sèvres – Manufacture et musée nationaux) / Martine Beck-Coppola.She seems again at you with unruffled calm in portraits by Élisabeth Vigée le Brun. Antoinette’s patronage of this gifted painter instantly takes you into a really totally different royal world from the misogynist fantasies of the revolutionary press: a female-dominated circle the place the queen’s fascination with vogue fed Vigée le Brun’s artwork. She favored to sport putting headgear on prime of colossal hairstyles: her caps, or “poufs”, celebrated such occasions as the invention of smallpox vaccination. To mark a French naval victory she wore a hat with a ship on prime. However the type that impressed Vigée le Brun was a easy, rustic look. In her portrait of the queen in a straw hat, Antoinette holds a pink rose, pausing from her flower-arranging to take a look at us. It’s a disgrace they couldn’t pair it with Vigée le Brun’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, which isn’t distant within the Nationwide Gallery.She was demonised not solely as a lavish spender however a rampant intercourse addict who cuckolded the kingAntoinette is downsizing right here. Impressed by the Romantic motion, her hairstyles acquired smaller within the late 1700s. She turned to nature because the folks turned on her, spending extra time in her personal retreat, the Petit Trianon, within the grounds of Versailles. You may see a gold-trimmed armchair from this pastoral hideout and, much more amazingly, a set of pretend gardening instruments that have been props within the pastoral dramas she carried out at its theatre. The concepts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who praised the state of nature and condemned civilised corruption, are mirrored in her “pure” life-style, besides she couldn’t assist categorical this in line with the codes and tradition of the court docket – luxuriously.One other pure vogue in 18th-century France was for upper-class ladies to breastfeed their very own youngsters, as an alternative of using a wetnurse. This splendid is widely known by Antoinette’s “breast cup”, an ideal porcelain simulacrum of a breast, rumoured to have been personally modelled by the queen.Again to nature … Marie Antoinette with a Rose by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun. {Photograph}: Christophe Fouin/© Château de Versailles, Dist. Grand Palais RMNRevolutionaries would say (and did say) that every one this was a wealthy girl’s fantasy of naturalness expressed in utterly unnatural, consumerist methods. But she was simply making use of all of the comforts of French upper-class tradition. There’s a ravishing assortment of painted followers right here, every one a fluttering piece of pictorial artwork that includes lovers, gods, or a satirical scene through which a hairdresser stands on a ladder to work on a girl’s towering coiffure.As for the garments, they’re straight out of a fairytale. The gown de cour (court docket gown) that the Queen of Sweden wore for her wedding ceremony in 1774 is a glittering silver dream past any Disney fantasy. This and different clothes worn within the 18th century stand in a corridor of mirrors, their invisible occupants haunting the gallery. Intimate relics belonging to the queen herself embody jewels, her piano, her fragrance bottles and pot pourri bowls. Versailles apparently stank.The revolution introduced an finish to fripperies. Reality was all – but this too was expressed in vogue. Designs for revolutionary gown present his-and-hers patriotic costumes, together with a Roman republican outfit. An outline of the Competition of the Federation in 1790 exhibits the royal household conforming to the brand new methods. However by 1793, the guillotine beckoned.A glittering silver dream … the Queen of Sweden’s wedding ceremony robe. {Photograph}: Göran Schmidt Livrustkammaren/SHMAnd right here it’s. A surviving a part of an actual guillotine from the revolution, with its rotted black wooden and still-sharp, still-usable blade has been lent by the Madame Tussauds archive. It might have been the very machine that beheaded Antoinette on the Place de la Concorde – then known as the Place de la Révolution – on 16 October 1793. A print exhibits the executioner holding up her head for the group to see, blood streaming from her neck.After this, the reinvention of Antoinette in fashionable tradition is explored, however it’s the least convincing a part of the exhibition. There’s a photograph of Kate Moss in “Marie Antoinette garments”, and props from the movie Marie Antoinette. All high quality, however in actuality this isn’t a present about type. It’s a few girl who lived and died within the storm of historical past. Her remaining observe from her dying cell is right here: “Mon Dieu! Ayez pitié de moi!” (My God! Have pity for me!) How might you not? Marie Antoinette Fashion is on the V&A, London, from 20 September