It’s impossible to overestimate Manolo Blahnik’s enthusiasm for Marie Antoinette, which began at a young age, and has only grown stronger over the decades. As a child Blahnik listened to his mother read him Stefan Zweig’s 1932 biography of France’s much-maligned queen and while that may have been an unconventional choice, she was careful to skip over “all the horrible” parts, he recalled.
Over the years Blahnik has read even more about her, and engaged with the legacy of Marie Antoinette in myriad ways, including hand-making the extravagant pastel footwear for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film starring Kirsten Dunst, which was based on Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography of the queen.
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Now he’s going even deeper as the sole sponsor of “Marie Antoinette Style,” Britain’s first show about the French queen, which opens this month at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
For Blahnik, the sponsorship is more than just a show of support for his favorite historical figure. It’s a long-overdue opportunity for “revenge. That is what makes me happy. People have really put Marie Antoinette where she belongs in the world. She was an incredible woman, who was very, very badly judged as frivolous and stupid,” during her lifetime, said Blahnik in an interview.
Like Fraser and other writers over the past few decades, the V&A wants to stamp out the clichés that have persisted for centuries — that she was stupid, conniving, unusually extravagant and an unfaithful wife to King Louis XVI.
The world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design is making its case by looking at Marie Antoinette’s personal style, her forward-thinking ideas about fashion and her enduring influence on designers through the centuries.
The show, which runs from Saturday and until March 22, 2026, features 250 objects and exceptional loans never seen before outside Versailles and France.
It showcases personal items owned and worn by the ill-fated queen, including silk slippers, jewels from her private collection and the final note she wrote before her appointment with the guillotine in October 1793.
The display also includes richly embellished fragments of court dress, accessories and intimate items from her toilette case. There are also personal effects such as the queen’s dinner service from the Petit Trianon, the chateau on the grounds of Versailles where she gardened, spent time with her girlfriends, and escaped the rigor and pressure of court life.
The show has a contemporary bent, too, with a display of fashion from brands including Moschino, Dior, Chanel and Vivienne Westwood who were influenced by the queen’s style. Costumes for the big screen are on display, including those from Coppola’s Oscar-winning “Marie Antoinette.” Blahnik’s footwear for the film, and his working sketches, are also part of the show.
Sarah Grant, lead curator of the exhibition, said the museum wants to show that Marie Antoinette was “a fashion icon in her own time, and continues to have an influence on fashion and design” more than 230 years after her death.
“No other historical figure has had this continuous and lasting impact on fashion, nor has their physical appearance become a part of their own style to the degree that Marie Antoinette has. We tell the queen’s own story, and consider which elements of her style resonate the most for contemporary audiences and creative industries, exploring how each successive generation has interpreted and used her style differently,” added Grant.
Blahnik has always been moved by the queen’s elegance, culture and grace under immense pressure. The daughter of a Habsburg emperor, she loved music, played a variety of instruments, and grew up in Vienna surrounded by the sounds of composers including Christoph Willibald Glück, her music teacher, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, her contemporary.
She introduced the French court to the composers of her youth, and they were unimpressed, at first. “The first time Glück went to Paris, the French didn’t like it. The second time, when Marie Antoinette was little bit older, he was an incredible success,” said Blahnik, adding the queen’s taste in music was spot-on. “We’re still listening to Glück today,” he said.
He also admires her taste and style. Who wouldn’t? Marie Antoinette was a forward-thinker, casting off her corset (in private) and opting for looser, less fussy silhouettes that would become all the rage post-revolution.
Although she was famous for her mile-high coiffures, the queen also wore her hair short for a while, a style devised by her hairdresser Léonard Autié, who would also weave flowers through it. It was all part of the queen’s back-to-nature aesthetic and semi-embrace of the Enlightenment ideals that were all the rage in late 18th century France.
Blahnik said the queen worked closely with her dressmaker Rose Bertin on her look, and often made changes to the designs. “She knew exactly what she wanted,” he said.
To mark the opening of the show, Blahnik has designed a new capsule collection that will land in-store this month.
Some of the styles have French heels, their curvy shape inspired by King Louis XIV. Others have flowery, embroidered patterns that mimic the fabric on Marie Antoinette’s furniture or “powder-puff pink” shades drawn from the queen’s makeup and rose garden. Blahnik has included signature details from the era, such as box pleats and frayed silk edges.
Anyone slipping on those shoes will be stepping into history. Grant said Blahnik’s designs capture “all the artistry, romance and intrigue of the 18th century in one small object.”
She added that Blahnik’s designs for the film are also a “poignant leitmotif” in Marie Antoinette’s story, and highlight some of the most difficult moments of her life.
The young royal had to master the “Versailles glide” when she arrived at the French court, taking little steps in high court mules to make it look as if she was floating effortlessly across the floor. Blahnik also recreated the shoe “that supposedly fell from her foot in her final steps towards the scaffold,” said Grant.
This show may tap into Blahnik’s lifelong passion for the French queen, but the sponsorship is by no means a one-off. It’s part of the Manolo Blahnik brand’s wider strategy of support for the arts, including eponymous scholarships offered through University of the Arts London, and support of institutions such as the V&A and The Wallace Collection.
Kristina Blahnik, chief executive officer of Manolo Blahnik, believes the show is a golden opportunity to speak to “a society that is increasingly captured by veneers of history, not the depths of it. Manolo is very much creatively inspired and stimulated by the depths of history, and by the details, complexities and layers of it.”
She added that the exhibition also offers Blahnik — the man and the brand — the chance to show “how one person, and her style, has transcended multiple centuries and still is relevant to this day — in the arts, architecture, furniture, fashion and literature. That’s why this exhibition is so wonderful, because it’s not just about Marie Antoinette’s life, but about how her aesthetics have shaped other creatives’ identities.”
The company plans to have lots of fun spinning all of the 18th century drama and culture into a series of events and moments. Team Blahnik is planning an archive presentation at the brand’s Mayfair townhouse; a themed tea at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris, where Marie Antoinette took piano lessons, during Paris Fashion Week next month, and a takeover of Burlington Arcade in London that began Monday.
Burlington Arcade is a full-on Marie Antoinette experience. At the Piccadilly entrance, Ladurée is showcasing its blue speckled Marie Antoinette macarons, made with black tea from China and India, rose petals, citrus and honey. The carpet and ornaments in the arcade reflect the theme, while the shoes from the new capsule are on show at Blahnik’s shop, at the other end, near Burlington Gardens.
In the midst of it all, Blahnik continues to hit the books, travel and research his next collections. He’s a fan of classical and neo-classical architecture “for the beautiful equilibrium in the forms,” and draws inspiration from far and near, including the temples of Sicily and Greece and John Nash’s spare, elegant buildings around Regent’s Park in London.
He lives in Bath, a UNESCO World Heritage site, that’s famous for its grand Georgian townhouses made from the local honey-toned limestone.
“In the next few years, I’m going to visit Greece — everywhere! And then, if I have the energy, Italy, and then Spain,” said the designer, who was raised on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, where his family had a banana plantation.
With the Marie Antoinette show set to open, Blahnik is also at work on his next collection.
“It’s still a jumble in my head, but I’ll be looking at the future. I’m still trying to find out what the future is — but it won’t be Courrèges or Cardin,” said the designer, who’s currently experimenting with metal and who’ll no doubt be mining the past for his ideas.
