New Orleans Museum of Art to show Marie Antoinette style in 2027
The New Orleans Museum of Art will host the first major exhibition in North America focused on Marie Antoinette as a style icon. Opening November 14, 2027, and continuing through March 12, 2028, the show examines the origins of the aesthetic associated with the queen of France from 1774 until the Revolution and its repeated revivals across design, fashion, film and decorative arts.
More than 150 objects will be on view, among them 39 fashion ensembles. Historical court gowns, jewelry and personal items once owned by Marie Antoinette appear alongside contemporary designs by Moschino, Chanel, Erdem, Vivienne Westwood and Valentino. Costumes created for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film starring Kirsten Dunst are included, as are loans from European collections, many never previously exhibited in North America, together with paintings, works on paper, sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations.
Organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the exhibition travels after its New Orleans presentation to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville from June 9 to September 17, 2028, and then to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto from October 28, 2028, to February 25, 2029.
NOMA’s collection features a monumental c. 1788 portrait of the queen by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, her preferred painter and the most important woman painter of the 1700s. Director Susan Taylor said the city’s centuries-long connection to French history makes New Orleans an ideal setting to explore the monarch’s global influence on art, design and fashion. Curator Mel Buchanan noted that the style’s theatricality remains relevant to contemporary dress and that the exhibition places international loans in conversation with NOMA’s painting, a visitor favorite for more than forty years.
Presented chronologically, the first section covers 1770 to 1793 and presents the queen’s biography together with the styles she shaped, including a 1773 portrait by François-Hubert Drouais, the Sutherland diamond necklace associated with the 1784 Affair of the Diamond Necklace, rare fragments of court dress, an armchair bearing her gilded monogram and accessories that document the rise of the French fashion industry. The middle section examines mid-nineteenth-century revivals under Empress Eugénie, featuring her gowns and late-nineteenth-century photographs of Versailles by Eugène Atget and Francis Frith. The final section surveys twentieth- and twenty-first-century reinterpretations through works by Valentino, Christian Lacroix, Vivienne Westwood, Fenty x Puma and Moschino, plus modern iterations of toile de Jouy prints and ensembles from Karl Lagerfeld’s 2013 Chanel Resort collection staged at Versailles.
During the run, NOMA will present an installation of eighteenth-century paintings and prints by Claude Lorrain, Jacques-Louis David, François Boucher and Jean-Baptiste Greuze alongside Sèvres porcelain produced for the Ancien Régime court. Large-scale photographs from Robert Polidori’s twenty-five-year project documenting conservation work at the Château de Versailles will also be shown, drawn from the museum’s collection.
