NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS MARIE ANTOINETTE STYLE
Dedicated to one of history’s most captivating figures, the exhibition opening November 14, 2027, features over 150 objects, including loans never before on view in the United States.
On display will be rare personal items owned and worn by the influential early modern celebrity, including fragments of Marie Antoinette’s silk gowns, along with remarkable furniture and ceramics commissioned by the French queen for her intimate interiors.
Featured contemporary couture shows her impact on the 20th and 21st centuries. On view will be designs by Chanel, Valentino, and Vivienne Westwood, as well as costumes made for Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Marie Antoinette.
Accompanying presentations will draw connections to works in NOMA’s celebrated collection, including an exquisite portrait of the queen by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
Left: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, in Court Dress; oil painting. François Hubert Drouais, 1773. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Right: Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in Marie Antoinette (2006). Courtesy of I WANT CANDY LLC and Zoetrope Corp.
NEW ORLEANS – Next year, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) will present Marie Antoinette Style, the first major exhibition in North America dedicated to one of the most captivating style icons in world history.
Opening in November 2027, the exhibition will explore the origins and countless revivals of the style shaped by Marie Antoinette, Queen of France from 1774 until the French Revolution. A leading fashion figure in her own time, the ill-fated monarch has had a lasting influence on over 250 years of design, fashion, film, and decorative arts.
Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the exhibition will be on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art from November 14, 2027, to March 12, 2028, followed by presentations at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
“We are thrilled to welcome this landmark international exhibition to NOMA,” said Susan Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. “As a city defined by its vibrant culture and centuries-long connection to French history, New Orleans and Louisiana provide the ideal backdrop to explore Marie Antoinette’s enduring global influence on art, design, and fashion. Marie Antoinette Style underscores NOMA’s role as a major cultural institution, and we look forward to welcoming our neighbors and visitors for conversations about the ways Marie Antoinette’s influence continues to shape culture and inspire creativity today.”
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, c. 1788. Oil on canvas. New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum purchase, Women’s Volunteer Committee and Carrie Heiderich Funds, 85.90.
One hallmark of NOMA’s collection is a monumental c. 1788 portrait of Marie Antoinette painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the French queen’s preferred painter and considered to be the most important woman painter of the 1700s. The oil painting is a rare example of a portrait of Marie Antoinette by Le Brun in the United States.
“Marie Antoinette’s iconic style was influential worldwide in the 18th century, and its spirit of theatricality is relevant to how we communicate ideas through our dress,” said Mel Buchanan, RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at NOMA. “In addition to opulent 18th-century court gowns, this exhibition brings artworks from European collections, many never before seen in North America, in conversation with NOMA’s own iconic painting of Marie Antoinette—a visitor favorite for more than forty years.”
Left: Necklace containing the Sutherland Diamonds, 18th century. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Right: Jean-Baptiste-Claude Sené, Marie Antoinette’s Armchair, 1788. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Featuring over 150 objects, including 39 fashion ensembles, Marie Antoinette Style will include a dazzling array of historical and contemporary fashion and jewelry, alongside paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and immersive audiovisual installations to explore how and why Marie Antoinette—the person and the myth—has provided a constant source of inspiration. The exhibition will also consider afresh the legacy of a complex figure whose style, youth, and notoriety have all contributed to her timeless appeal. Works include loans from international collections and key objects from the V&A in London.
Marie Antoinette shaped not just the fashion, design, interiors, gardens, and fine and decorative arts of her own time but has continued to exert an influence over more than two and a half centuries of graphic and decorative arts, fashion, photography, film, and performance. On display will be exceptionally rare personal items owned and worn by Marie Antoinette, including richly embellished fragments of court dress.
The exhibition will also feature contemporary couture pieces by designers such as Moschino, Chanel, Erdem, Vivienne Westwood, and Valentino, and costumes made for the screen, such as those created for Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Marie Antoinette film starring Kirsten Dunst.
“The most fashionable, scrutinised 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,” said Sarah Grant, the V&A curator of Marie Antoinette Style. “This exhibition explores that style and the figure at its center, using a range of exquisite objects belonging to Marie Antoinette, alongside the most beautiful fine and decorative objects that her legacy has inspired. This is 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 18th century.”
Left: Sèvres porcelain factory (France), Portrait Bust of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 1788. Soft-paste biscuit porcelain. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Right: George Barbier, Initial ‘M’ from Letter LXXXVIII from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1934. Hand-colored pochoir print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
During the run of Marie Antoinette Style, NOMA programming and installations will draw further connections between the exhibition, the museum’s collection, and the city’s French heritage.
NOMA will present an installation of works from its collection, including 18th-century paintings and prints by artists such as Claude Lorrain, Jacques-Louis David, François Boucher, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, intermixed with decorative arts, including exquisite porcelain produced at the royal manufactory at Sèvres for the Ancien Régime court. These works of art exploring global royalty, court fashion, and French politics will provide added context to Marie Antoinette Style and NOMA’s portrait of the queen by Vigée Le Brun.
Additionally, NOMA will install a selection of photographs from Robert Polidori’s landmark 25-year project Versailles: Transitional States. Drawn entirely from the museum’s collection, the large-scale prints were created through Polidori’s exclusive contract to document the extensive conservation and renovation efforts of the Château de Versailles. The series offers a glimpse into the transformation of the palace into a museum tasked with conserving both art and French cultural heritage.
Additional opportunities to explore artworks, themes, and ideas from Marie Antoinette Style throughout the museum through installations and programming will be announced in 2027.
CREATED BY THE V&A — TOURING THE WORLD
The presentation of Marie Antoinette Style at NOMA is the first of three North American stops on a world tour.
- New Orleans Museum of Art: November 14, 2027–March 12, 2028
- Frist Museum of Art, Nashville: June 9–September 17, 2028
- Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto: October 28, 2028–February 25, 2029
EXHIBITION DETAILS
Presented chronologically, Marie Antoinette Style’s first section begins in 1770, at the marriage of the young Austrian Archduchess to the dauphin of France (future Louis XVI), and ends at Marie Antoinette’s execution in 1793. Marie Antoinette: The Origins of a Style presents the queen’s biography and the styles she forged and shaped. On display will be key pieces of courtly fashion, jewelry, furniture, porcelain, and musical instruments from her court, revealing her roles and interests as queen consort. It will consider the way in which she embraced some aspects of Enlightenment thought through her approach to maternity and childhood and support of new technologies. It will also address the “let them eat cake” mythology and mythmaking that surround the queen to this day, drawing on recent research on early modern women, queenship, and celebrity.
The story begins with a stunning 1773 oval portrait of the young dauphine commissioned by King Louis XV from the artist François-Hubert Drouais. The 17-year-old Marie regally wears a three-strand diamond bow choker and a French court gown embellished with delicate lace, intricate embroidery, and silk flowers.
Highlights in this section include the Sutherland diamond necklace, thought to be made from the extraordinary original stones from the necklace in the scandalous 1784 “Affair of the Diamond Necklace.” This section will also display exceptionally rare court gowns, fragments of embroidery and silk dresses that belonged to Marie Antoinette, along with 18th-century shoes, fans, prints, and accessories that evidence the emergence of today’s French fashion industry.
Other personal items include works of art made for the queen’s interiors, which she designed for the Petit Trianon and Château de Saint-Cloud, including an armchair with the queen’s gilded “MA” monogram.
The exhibition’s middle section, Marie Antoinette Memorialised: The Birth of a Style Cult, explores the revival of Marie Antoinette’s style in the mid-1800s. Romanticization in the 1850s and 1860s by French Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, led to a renewed interest in and restoration work at Versailles. The presentation will include gowns worn by Eugénie and late 19th-century photographs of Versailles and its gardens by photographers Eugène Atget and Francis Frith, augmented with examples from NOMA’s important photography collection. This sentimental view of Marie Antoinette continued throughout the century, peaking again in the 1880s and 1890s, and with a new phase of fantasy, magic, and fairy tales in the early 20th century. The queen’s image came to embody escapism and beauty, as well as decadence and debauchery, explored in the exhibition with luminous 1920s watercolor illustrations by Golden Age illustrators Erté and George Barbier.
Finally, in Marie Antoinette Re-Styled, the final section will consider the modern and contemporary legacy of the Marie Antoinette style from the 20th century to the present day in fashion, performance, and pop culture. Gowns include pieces from legendary French and international fashion houses, including Valentino, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood, Fenty x Puma, and Moschino, as well as modern art iterations of traditional French Toile de Jouy prints. Costumes, accessories, film, and stills will bring to life the queen’s enduring legacy in film, stage performance, and even music videos, including costumes and Manolo Blahnik-designed shoes from Sofia Coppola’s Academy Award-winning 2006 Marie Antoinette film. The installation features ensembles from Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel’s 2013 Resort collection, staged in the Château de Versailles gardens, with a fashion mash-up of 18th-century Marie Antoinette royal opulence and a modern, punk-infused rebellion.
Media Contact
Charlie Tatum
Director of Marketing and Communications
ctatum@noma.org
504.658.4103
About NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden
The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and its Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden are home to innovative exhibitions, installations, educational programs, and research. Exploring human creativity across time, cultures, and disciplines, the global scope of the museum’s initiatives opens a vibrant dialogue with the history and culture of New Orleans. The museum stewards a collection of nearly 50,000 works, with exceptional holdings in African art, photography, decorative arts, and Japanese art, as well as strengths in American and French art and an expanding collection highlighting contemporary artists. The museum’s exhibitions and dynamic learning and engagement offerings serve as a forum for visitors to engage with diverse perspectives, share cultural experiences, and foster a life of learning at all ages. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Willie Birch: Stories to Tell, Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection, New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers, and The Orléans Collection (an exhibition of forty European masterpieces from the collection of the city’s namesake, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans).
NOMA’s 12-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden expands visitors’ experiences of the museum with one of the most notable sculpture gardens in the country. The Besthoff Sculpture Garden, free and open to the public seven days a week, has nearly 100 sculptures and outdoor works of art situated in a unique landscape featuring Spanish moss-laden live oaks and a sinuous lagoon surrounded by an expansive ecosystem of native plants. The works in the garden range from the 19th to the 21st centuries, with pieces by Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Sean Scully, Maya Lin, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Do Ho Suh, Ugo Rondinone, Wangechi Mutu, Hank Willis Thomas, and many others. The Besthoff Sculpture Garden features contemporary design elements, including a sculpture pavilion, an amphitheater, and an architecturally significant canal link bridge connecting the garden’s original 2003 footprint with the 2019 expansion. Its water management practices support the health and resiliency of New Orleans City Park and the surrounding environment. Throughout the year, NOMA hosts outdoor programs in the Besthoff Sculpture Garden, including festivals, performances, wellness classes, tours, and more.