Marie Antoinette: fashion revolutionary or vacuous spendthrift?

The observer at the wedding, the Duchess of Northumberland, goes on to say that Marie Antoinette is “fair and a little mark’d with smallpox. She really had quite a load of jewells.” Some sense of her actual person, not just her possessions, is what animates Marie Antoinette Style, this magnificent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the first in the UK entirely devoted to this lively young Austrian married to an ineffectual French cuckold.

A portrait of the young Marie Antoinette comes alive through CGI at the entrance, turning back and forth on screen, so that you see her bulbous nose, rosebud lips and slightly exophthalmic eyes. Porcelain busts confirm every feature. You see her waxing and waning in paintings, breast-feeding, chatting to her husband while a hairdresser tends to the powdered wig. A corset pierced with constellations of pinpricks is clearly designed to expand and contract with each pregnancy.

Here is her shapely handwriting, occasionally redacted, in letters to the Swedish soldier Count Fersen, her probable lover. And the final note, written at 4.30am in her prayerbook on the day of her execution in 1793: “My lord have pity on me! My eyes have no more tears to cry for you my poor children; adieu, adieu!”

It might be remembered that her eight-year-old son had been forced to accuse her of child sexual abuse at the trial. For all the jewels that brushed against her skin – the copious pearl pendants and diamond bracelets on display at the V&A – nothing takes you closer to this woman than the movement of her hand across the page or the simple garments she wore in the last days.

Superbly curated by Sarah Grant, who also edits what must be this year’s most sumptuous catalogue, including essays by Antonia Fraser and love letters from Sofia Coppola and Manolo Blahnik, who hand-stitched the shoes worn by Kirsten Dunst in Coppola’s 2006 fanciful biopic, the concept is unusually considered.

The mise-en-scene is a Versailles of exhibits in mirrored light or spotlit darkness, grand halls or private boudoirs. It presents the most staggering 18th-century fashions; silk woven to look like deliberate blurs or two-tone sunsets, dresses garlanded with three-dimensional flowers, travelling capes where the hood or sleeves could be removed, satin mufflers for passing secret notes.

Some of this is sheer ancien régime excess – panniers so substantial the wearer could rest her forearms upon them, pleated trains that weighed several kilos. The teenage Marie Antoinette was known to wrench them off as soon as she reached her private apartments. But her own style evolves quite quickly: blond lace and diaphanous muslin, white cotton frocks and biscuit porcelain, towering hair and a fresh pastel palette.

The famous robe en chemise, so close to a nightdress, made of such cheap muslin it affronted the French silk industry into irate censure, is controversial to this day. Was she just wearing underclothes, showing off far too much anatomy, appropriating the dress of women in the Caribbean?

Perhaps this is what she actually wore to bed with both men and women in the Petit Trianon, according to licentious gossip. Without her example, as the curator argues, there would probably be no rage for contemporary cottagecore.

We have more of Marie Antoinette’s shoes than anything else. Her dresses were divvied up and given away as gifts or sold secondhand to boost the accounts in her lifetime. After her execution, most were torn apart or stolen. Sections of cloth have found their way abroad, which is how the Museum of London comes to own a stupendous silk panel embroidered with silver sequins, donated by the descendants of a member of the royal wardrobe.

Pink silk mules, decorated with glass beads, look so contemporary it’s as if accessories are the only fashion that scarcely changes. Her favourite style was the “Saint-Huberty”, named after a French opera singer, with heels the height of two thumbs. In 2012, a pair in pink and green stripes were auctioned for a record sum in Paris, reliquaries beyond price for the faithful.

Marie Antoinette is a vacuous profligate, buying four new pairs a week while the French are starving through winter and famine; or she is a style icon for a consumerist cult. It is true that her brother-in-law ordered new shoes every day, and that her possessions were later repurposed by Napoleon as gifts for Joséphine.

It is also true that Marie Antoinette spent less than her own husband. But consider that a grotesque 13% of the state budget was devoured entirely by the royal family.

The wedding-cake hairstyles and frothy frocks she wore, so briefly and so long ago, have become enduring emblems of decadence. Among the many exhibits that openly declare her influence at the V&A – Lanvin’s 1922 Marie Antoinette dress, costumes by Vivienne Westwood, Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano, heart-shaped cake forks and diamond bows, shoes by Blahnik – is Tim Walker’s spread of Kate Moss for Vogue in 2012. The wig she wears is made of the same blue silk as her Alexander McQueen gown, which seems to get straight to the head-to-toe artificiality of the Marie Antoinette look.

She wore tricolore mules of sky blue, white and rose pink to the Fête de la Fédération in 1790, absurdly trying to refashion herself to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Even in prison, she was still occasionally ordering new shoes of violet taffeta or eau de nil silk. The latter are in this exhibition: relics of pointless hope, symbols of exorbitant privilege.

The chemise she wore in prison is a bit of recycled linen, another form of relic. She is said to have been wearing black shoes to her execution, but they were not found in 1815 when her corpse was exhumed from the Madeleine cemetery. Contemporary accounts tell of her walking to her death with a light step.

Red ribbon chokers, symbolising the slice of the guillotine through her neck, became a Paris craze. So did the porcupine hairstyle, which imitated the shorn hair: coiffure à la guillotine, as it was known. If what the “queen of fashion” wanted to be known for was her style, then even in death, Marie Antoinette succeeded. But the style led to the execution.

All photographs courtesy of the V&A Museum