MARIE ANTOINETTE AT THE V&A

There are exhibitions you walk through, and exhibitions you kind of step into. The Marie Antoinette exhibition at the V&A felt like the second kind.

I went while I was in London, not really knowing what to expect. I thought it would be beautiful, which it was, but I didn't expect to notice quite so much about how everything was actually made. It ended up staying with me in a completely different way.

The first thing you notice is the scale. These dresses weren't made for comfort or ease, they were made to create presence — the panniers push everything outwards so the whole silhouette goes wide rather than long, almost architectural. Looking at them as someone who sews, I couldn't help focusing on the details: layers and layers of silk, hand-finished seams, embroidery so delicate it barely looks real, structure hidden underneath all that softness. Nothing felt random. Every pleat, every trim, every ribbon had a purpose, and yet everything still looks so soft, pale colours and florals, properly feminine. That mix of softness and control is what really stood out.

What I kept coming back to was the contrast in scale — her waist tiny, her shoes almost childlike, and then the skirts just enormous around her. The volume of fabric compared to how small she actually was felt genuinely striking, and all I could think about was the weight of it. Meters and meters of silk, layers built up over structure underneath — these weren't light dresses. They must have been properly heavy to wear, to move in, to carry around for hours. They weren't just clothes you put on, they were something you had to hold yourself inside of.

Something else that stayed with me was how young she actually was. Married at fourteen or fifteen, then placed into a world where every detail of how you looked mattered. The clothing wasn't really about style at that point, it was expectation, status, presentation — a very young girl inside extremely structured, formal clothing, expected to present herself a very particular way. It made the dresses feel different. Not just beautiful, but part of something much bigger than that.

What I found myself drawn to most was what sits underneath it all — the stays, the panniers, the internal layers, everything you don't see straight away but that's actually creating the shape. I think about that more now with my own sewing. The structure isn't separate from the beauty, it's the reason the beauty exists in the first place — the same thing came to mind again later at the Armani Privé retrospective in Milan, where that same discipline shows up in a completely different context.

What the exhibition does really well is show this wasn't just about clothing. It was about identity, about how she was seen, about what she was trying to say or maybe just what was expected of her. The softness, the detail, the slightly dreamlike feel of it all sits in real contrast with what we know was actually happening around her — and that contrast stays with you.

One fabric that kept coming to mind throughout was Toile de Jouy — that instantly recognizable print, soft scenes in a single colour, almost like little stories printed across the fabric. It became especially popular during her time, and you can see exactly why. It has that same feeling as the dresses: romantic, detailed, slightly idealised, almost like life but softened. It still shows up now too, in interiors and clothing and fabrics we're drawn to without always thinking about why.

(Funnily enough, I went straight from here to Liberty London the same day — more on that visit here, including how the Bridgerton displays upstairs connected straight back to everything I'd just seen.)

Towards the end of the exhibition, everything shifts. After all the structure, the silk, the detail, you're suddenly faced with something completely different — a simple white garment, plain, light, almost fragile. Knowing she was executed wearing something like this makes it feel very real. No structure, no volume, no decoration, none of the things that had defined how she was seen before. Just something simple. Reading her final note afterwards properly stops you for a second. After everything, all the layers and expectation and presentation, it comes back to something very human.

I walked through looking at dresses and left thinking about decisions — why that shape, why that fabric, why that structure. It reinforced something I keep coming back to: it's never just about how something looks, it's about how it's made and what it's actually doing. The Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibition at The Met explores exactly that, through a completely different lens.

If you've been following my Fashion School Diaries, you'll probably get why this one stuck with me — that shift from just looking at clothes to actually noticing how they're put together.