Before she was sent to the guillotine in 1793, 37-year-old Marie Antoinette couldn’t have imagined that more than two centuries later, she’d still be one of the most famous women in the world. The French queen’s jewels and furniture command record-breaking prices at auction; her porcelain and palace fabrics are reproduced and hawked by homeware brands; and her likeness is used on everything from expensive candles to throw blankets. She’s been the inspiration for a plethora of bestselling books, feature films, jazz and rap songs and fashion shows. 

If you need proof that the Biden-era embrace of quiet luxury has given way to something decidedly more ostentatious and maximal, look no further than Marie Antoinette’s renewed visibility. In the age of influencers, the Queen is a case study in spectacle and optics.

"She was constantly on parade, constantly performing and being watched, and she was scrutinized far more than celebrities are today,” says Sarah Grant, a senior curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which is currently hosting a show devoted to the queen’s style and legacy.

Marie Antoinette is also, of course, a cautionary tale - a symbol of what can happen in an era of political polarisation, concentrated wealth and corrosive income inequality. It is this, as much as her exuberant taste and rarified life, that makes her a potent mascot for our times.

Among the 250 treasures on display at the blockbuster V&A show (through March 22) are a pair of her tiny silk slippers; a clutch of her royal jewels, which the museum has reunited with her jewellery case, made by French cabinetmaker Martin Carlin in 1770 - the year of her marriage - on loan from Versailles; and her Sèvres dinner service from the Petit Trianon. Also in the exhibition are contemporary fashion looks inspired by her, including the shimmering gold lamé ballgown Grace Kelly wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief and a sweeping Eau de Nile silk Marquise Masquée gown, designed by John Galliano for Christian Dior’s Spring-Summer 1998 Haute Couture collection. 

The doomed Queen was a pioneer of influencing even in her own day. She established herself as a tastemaker almost immediately upon her arrival at Versailles at 14, as the Austrian princess bride of 15-year-old King Louis XVI. Caroline Weber, author of the bestselling Queen Of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To The Revolution, makes the case that her rocky early relationship with her young, eccentric husband made it difficult for her to do what queens were meant to do: bear heirs.

An oil painting of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France by Francois Hubert Drouais in 1773.Photo: V&A Museum, London

"She had to come up with another way to be important at the court and that was to be a style leader,” Weber says.

Marie Antoinette allowed her likeness to be reproduced in fashion engravings, a first for the royal court. She allowed her court stylist, Rose Bertin, to sell copies of her gowns to other women a few months after she’d worn the styles herself.

"She understood the power of imaging and was selling an image that the public wanted to consume and emulate,” Weber notes.

The economic power of her style - what is known at Sotheby’s auction house as the "Marie Antoinette Effect” - has continued almost unabated ever since. In 2018, Sotheby’s sold 10 pieces of her jewellery, including a diamond and natural pearl pendant for US$36.2mil (RM147mil) and a diamond bow brooch for US$2.1mil (RM8.5mil) (both are in the V&A show), and last year, it sold a 300-carat diamond necklace for US$4.8mil (RM19.5mil). There is a particular premium on anything that hasn’t been seen since her reign.

"The curiosity that she brings is enormous,” says Andres White Correal, Sotheby’s chairman of jewellery for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"She has these two sides that are completely different, but extremely appealing - the tragic side, because everyone can relate to her sadness when everything went wrong, and when she was the queen of style and was the most revered. Those two things make her human, like any of us.”

In 2022, Christie’s Paris auctioned two pieces of her furniture: a commode by Pierre Macret from 1770, and a neoclassical armchair by Georges Jacob from her bedroom at Versailles. Each went for close to €1mil (RM4.8mil). So did a table by Jean‑Henri Riesener, a woodworker for the queen, which the Rothschild family sold in 2019.

A person walks past AI artwork series created by Grimes, Mac Boucher, Mary Jacobo and Eurypheus called 'Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #1' and #2'at a press preview for 'Augmented Intelligence' at Christie's in New York last February. Photo: AFP

"We find that Marie Antoinette pieces appeal more than those of Louis XVI,” says Hippolyte de La Féronnière, the head of Christie’s European Furniture Department in Paris.

"People love her dramatic history. Yes, it’s the same as his, but the fact that she was a foreigner who arrived at Versailles and managed to conquer the court made for a personality bigger than that of Louis XIV, even if he was king. Her story is one of power.”

In 2023, Versailles reopened the newly restored Queen’s apartments, a suite of small rooms on the south side of the palace, with original 18th-century fabric designs, such as a lush, gold-embroidered lilac taffeta and several joyful toile de Jouy cottons. Rosebuds from one toile print have been reinterpreted on paper plates and cups by Meri Meri for Ladurée.

Several other patterns, including an India-style block-print featuring flowering branches and pineapples in red and mustard, have been reissued as fabric and wallpaper by Pierre Frey, the luxury French textile manufacturer. 

That print also served as the design inspiration for the most recent high jewellery piece by Maison Mellerio, one of Marie Antoinette’s original purveyors, which still has a store next to the Place Vendôme. Mellerio unveiled a one-of-a-kind necklace, called Jardin des Rêves, of gumdrop-size sapphires, aquamarines, tanzanites, tourmalines and topazes, and a gold-and-gem pineapple pendent, at a private reception at Versailles last summer. (Tagline: "Who hasn’t dreamed, for just one evening, of being a queen?”)

Beyond that, luxury candlemaker Cire Trudon has created a pink candle replicating the 18th-century wax bust of the queen attributed to the Brachard brothers. ("I have one,” Grant admits.) London-based shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, whose company is a sponsor of the V&A show, this summer dropped a limited-edition collection of frou-frou silk pumps he designed for Sofia Coppola’s lavish 2006 movie Marie Antoinette. 

"Marie Antoinette is a beacon of decadence, a style icon. People love her,” Grant says. "She’s an incredibly rich seam to mine, and because she’s a historical figure, she gives a bit of gravitas to any kind of incarnation or any kind of reference.”

Only the French - who sent her to the guillotine after all - seem to have an ambivalent relationship with her, as the world saw at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. During the parade, actors in the windows of the Conciergerie, the ancient city prison where she spent her final days, depicted Marie Antoinette holding her own severed head as the French heavy‑metal band Gojira sang about revolutionary themes.

"We cut their heads off and thought it was over forever,” La Féronnière says. "How wrong we were.” - Bloomberg