Tomorrow is Not Another Day
High camp and high treason, glamour and gore, makeup stories and made up stories, big wigs and bigwigs, political incorrectness and incorrect politics, the Marie Antoinette show at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a fitting and well fitted tribute to la dernière Reine de France. It’s the first ever British exhibition dedicated to the anglophile royal.
“Marie Antoinette is the most fashionable queen in history,” sparks curator Dr Sarah Grant so there are plenty of frocks on display. Long before she was incarcerated in Temple Gaol, Marie Antoinette was a prisoner of the largest gilded cage in history. Shipped off aged 14 from her home in Austria to be married to her cousin, becoming Queen at 18, she was never allowed to leave France. Courtiers updated her on the latest London trends.
“This was a woman whose choices practically generated the industry around couture and jobs for thousands of people,” barks Manolo Blahnik, one of the show’s sponsors. Hers was a rarefied vision unrivalled by subsequent regal patronage. Yet when she opted for simpler muslin dresses and straw hats in the 1780s over the ostentatious court gowns she had previously popularised, the silk merchants accused her of abandoning their industry.
More than 230 years after her death it’s hard to distinguish between the wild fiction and wilder truth. Myths are immortal. She almost definitely didn’t suggest the poverty stricken should stick to calorific sweet stuff but wouldn’t it be fun if she really did quip “I do take little care of my appearance”? Real letters trump fake news. Marie Antoinette’s mother, Empress Maria Theresa, admonished her in a letter of September 1776, “All the news from Paris is that … your finances are in disarray and weighed down with debt.”
Frivolity not form follows function when it comes to her choice of gardening tools. But hey a girl has to look good even when digging up soil! Her harpsichord is a reminder that Marie Antoinette was more than a clotheshorse. She was an accomplished musician and popularised the salon concert. A chair represents her interest in interior decoration: the Louis XVI furniture style is named after the wrong marriage partner. Seize that Seize!
But a headless dressed dummy is a harbinger of the horror ahead. Turn the corner into the penultimate exhibition space and in place of a crinoline is a smock. Next to a guillotine. A neon sign contains her words of August 1793 “Nothing can hurt me now”. She would be killed two months later. Aged 37, the Queen of Arts lived one year longer than the future Queen of Hearts.
Turn the next corner for a posthumous party. Today is a new day. True fashion never dies. Just ask John Galliano.
