LONDON – Manolo Blahnik will sponsor “Marie Antoinette Style,” an unprecedented show at the Victoria and Albert Museum featuring 250 objects and exceptional loans never seen before outside Versailles, and France.

Running from Sept. 20 and until March 22, 2026, it will also showcase personal items owned and worn by France’s last queen before the Revolution. On display will be her silk slippers, jewels from her private collection and the final note she ever wrote.

The display will include richly-embellished fragments of court dress, personal effects such as the queen’s dinner service from the Petit Trianon, accessories and intimate items from her toilette case.

The show will have a contemporary bent, too, with a display of fashion – from brands including Moschino, Dior, Chanel and Vivienne Westwood – influenced by the queen’s distinctive style.

Costumes made for the big screen will be on display, including from Sofia Coppola’s stylish, Oscar-winning “Marie Antoinette,” where Manolo Blahnik supplied the delicate macaron-toned footwear.

The V&A said it wants to explore “the origins and countless revivals of the style shaped by the most fashionable queen in history. A fashion icon in her own time, and an early modern ‘celebrity,’ the dress and interiors modelled and adopted by the ill-fated queen of France in the final decades of the 18th century have had a lasting influence on over 250 years of design, fashion, film and decorative arts.”

There are exceptional loans from the Château de Versailles never before seen outside France, while the museum said it is preparing audio visual installations and “immersive curation” to explore how and why the late queen has been a constant source of inspiration.

“The exhibition will consider afresh the legacy of a complex figure whose style, youth and notoriety have all contributed to her timeless appeal,” the V&A added.

The museum is making a case for Marie Antoinette as an influencer beyond fashion, in design, interiors, gardens, and the fine and decorative arts of her own time, and on future generations. It will aim to point out how she influenced  graphic and decorative arts, fashion, photography, film and performance.

It is planning theatrical staging and sensory experiences, one of which will recreate scents of the court, and the perfume favored by the queen herself. 

The exhibition’s curator, Sarah Grant, said “the most fashionable, scrutinized and controversial queen in history, Marie Antoinette’s name summons both visions of excess and objects and interiors of great beauty. The Austrian archduchess-turned-queen of France had an enormous impact on European taste and fashion in her own time, creating a distinctive style that now has universal appeal and application.”

Grant described the show as “the design legacy of an early modern celebrity, and the story of a woman whose power to fascinate has never ebbed. Marie Antoinette’s story has been re-told and re-purposed by each successive generation to suit its own ends. The rare combination of glamour, spectacle and tragedy she presents remains as intoxicating today as it was in the eighteenth century.”

The V&A announcement coincides with Christie’s “Magnificent Jewels” auction, where the top lot is the Marie-Thérèse Pink Diamond once owned by Marie Antoinette. The live auction takes place Tuesday at the auction house’s premises in York City’s Rockefeller Center.

The purple-pink modified kite brilliant-cut diamond features 10.38 carats, and holds an estimated value between $3 million and $5 million. The piece is believed to date to the mid-18th century, per Christie’s, and holds with it storied lore regarding its past owners.

According to the auction house, Marie Antoinette trusted her most valuable jewels with her faithful coiffeur on the night before her failed escape from Paris in 1791, in the hope of retrieving them one day. Unable to escape the ongoing revolution, Marie Antoinette never saw her jewels again.