Marie Antoinette: How the most fashionable queen in history transformed French style

Marie Antoinette created a world of beauty. Hers was a rarefied vision unrivalled by subsequent royal patronage: ‘improvements in the greatest style of magnificence’, said a member of the Duke of Dorset’s staff at the British Embassy. It was realised with unparalleled flair at immense expense — ‘All the news from Paris is that… your finances are in disarray and weighed down with debt,’ her mother admonished her in a letter of September 1776 — and it cost her both her throne and her life.

The French Queen lived in a period in which princely patronage aimed to impress. ‘The Paris way of living is extremely magnificent,’ the Earl of Hertford wrote to Horace Walpole in November 1763. Crowning all was Versailles, the most splendid palace in Europe, of which an English visitor in the 1680s commented: ‘Having seen Versailles, there remains nothing worth þe seeing in France.’ A future American president sounded a rare dissenting note. In 1778, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail: ‘But what is all this to me? I receive but little pleasure in beholding these things, because I cannot but consider them as Bagatelles.’

Marie Antoinette, the Austrian archduchess who in 1770, at the tender age of 14, had married the future Louis XVI of France, had a genius for bagatelles. From bespoke scents supplied by Jean-Louis Fargeon, a perfumier from Montpellier, to the 300 hyacinth bulbs ordered to scent her bedchamber in the winter of 1778 and the wool and silk embroidery threads supplied by Adélaïde Henriette Damoville, known professionally as ‘Madame Eloffe’, her favourite milliner (and purveyor of royal lingerie), Marie Antoinette surrounded herself with items of the highest quality, however small in scale, however evanescent their purpose. ‘A sovereign must purchase things… in order to support craftsmen, yet make it a rule that these should be objects made in your own country and not purchased from abroad,’ her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, once told another daughter, Queen Maria Caroline of Naples. Until her death in 1793, Marie Antoinette was assiduous in her promotion of French manufactories.

As a new exhibition at the V&A Museum demonstrates, she, not her husband, was responsible for the evolution of the Louis XVI style. The items on display will include a fragment of one of the Queen’s petticoats, her eye bath — made at the short-lived hard-paste porcelain factory in Paris known as the Manufacture du duc d’Orleans — a diamond bow brooch, her piano and the last note she ever wrote. Also on show will be a perfume burner inspired by a marble bas-relief in the Cesi chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome, Italy. The Queen acquired it at the auction of the collection of the duc d’Aumount in 1782 and displayed it prominently on the chimneypiece of one of her favourite private rooms, the Cabinet de la Méridienne at Versailles. Her appreciation of this dazzling, historicist confection of gilt bronze and red jasper, created by Pierre Gouthiere, the finest bronze worker of the 18th century, makes clear that France’s last, ill-fated consort — beloved of generations of film-makers — was much more than a queen of fashion.

In 1774, following decades of royal mismanagement, a flawed taxation system and a series of disastrous foreign wars, Louis XVI inherited a kingdom on the brink of bankruptcy. The cost of the royal court has been estimated at 6% of the national budget and Louis XVI was understandably (albeit intermittently) concerned with economy. Not so Marie Antoinette.

In 1782, the baronne d’Oberkirch visited the King and Queen’s private apartments at Versailles. ‘Louis XVI has simple tastes,’ she wrote. ‘I found them beautiful but less elaborate than the Queen’s.’ The King nurtured a passion for the sumptuous soft-paste porcelain produced at the Sèvres factory that, since 1759, had belonged to the Crown; he commissioned furniture, book bindings, mechanical objects and tapestries for himself, stipulating that bookcases, commodes and writing desks be made without sharp corners in order to avoid the accidents to which he was prone in his short-sightedness, but he avoided the costly building projects of his predecessors. Instead, it was Marie Antoinette, exercising the cultural leadership associated with consortship, who patronised French luxury-goods makers, from her dressmaker Rose Bertin and metalworker Étienne Martincourt to her favourite cabinet-maker, Jean Henri Riesener, and her portraitist of choice, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

The Queen’s involvement in each commission was invariably discerning and decisive. In 1787, for example, she rejected the proposed design for a new jewel cabinet made by Jean-Démosthène Dugourc, choosing instead a more assertively neo-Classical piece by Ferdinand Schwerdfeger, complete with gilded female figures and painted panels of grotesqueries. In some instances, the Queen was unconcerned by novelty. In 1788, she took delivery of two pairs of gilt-bronze wall lights destined for the new royal palace of Saint-Cloud. The design of eagle’s heads and garlands of flowers by Louis-Gabriel Feloix was not new. Louis XVI’s aunt, Madame Adélaïde — disparaged by Horace Walpole as a ‘clumsy, plump old wench’ — had approved similar designs for her bedroom at Versailles six months earlier.

Marie Antoinette’s projects consisted of remodelling both her formal and her private apartments. Above all, she is associated with the Petit Trianon, the charming neo-Classical pavilion designed in 1758 by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV in the gardens of Versailles. It became the Queen’s favourite escape from the stifling etiquette of the court and, over two decades, she created what 19th-century French historian Pierre de Nolhac described as ‘rooms that were undoubtedly exceedingly elegant in their furnishings and decorations, but in no case very lavish: pure good taste in place of the expected luxury’.

Lady Antonia Fraser has suggested that ‘a major part of the Queen’s enthusiasm for decoration concerned furniture’. Among the commissions for Trianon was the set of chairs made in 1787 by Georges Jacob for Marie Antoinette’s bedroom. Carved by Jean-Baptiste Simon Rode and painted by Jean-Baptiste Chaillot de Prusse, these delightful, ‘rustic’ pieces were intended to link the interior of the Trianon with the English-style gardens beyond, which had been commissioned by the Queen from the comte de Caraman. The chairs are decorated with three-dimensional leaves and jasmine flowers, pinecones and ribbons, and were upholstered in fabric woven by Marie-Olivier Defarges with a pattern of scattered cornflowers, the Queen’s favourite.

Commissions of this sort were crucial to the economy of the town of Lyons, in which about 60,000 of the 150,000-strong population were employed in the silk-weaving industry. Similar commissions in the 1780s for schemes at Versailles, Compiègne, Rambouillet and Saint-Cloud, including the summer hangings of the Queen’s Bedchamber at Versailles, with their pattern of flowers and peacock feathers in Marie Antoinette’s preferred shades of lilac, mauve and grey-white, led to further lucrative royal orders, including from Catherine the Great of Russia.

Magnificence was seldom the Queen’s primary aim. Brought up in the less rigid atmosphere of the Austrian court, she embraced items and styles that reminded her of the freedom she had forfeited through marriage. She admired the printed toiles produced by Christopher-Philippe Oberkampf at his factory at Jouy-en-Josas, close to Versailles, with their pastoral landscapes and idealised bucolia. In a room of her private apartments, she hung toile de Jouy curtains lined with white taffeta, a far cry from the woven silks and heavy damasks she used elsewhere.

‘All Gold & Glass’ was Welsh traveller Mrs Thrale’s dismissal of the interiors she visited in France in 1775. Certainly, gold leaf and looking glass were key components of Marie Antoinette’s style. In a number of instances, however, the effect was neither heavy nor sumptuous. Instead, elegant lines and flashes of whimsy inject these royal commissions with a charm that is absent from many palace rooms, such as the giltwood chairs supplied by furniture-maker Georges Jacob in 1785 to the Cabinet de la Méridienne. Their golden armrests feature sphinxes—and, less conventionally, shaggy-haired lap dogs, whose soulful eyes gaze directly at passers-by, lost in time, forging a link between past and present.

'Marie Antoinette Style' is at the V&A Museum, London SW7, from September 20–March 22, 2026

This article originally appeared in the September 3 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here