As London’s Victoria and Albert Museum hosts its new exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style, with the inimitable shoe designer Manolo Blahnik as sponsor, visitors will step into a world of silk roses, embroidered violets, and shoes that could rival a bouquet from the gardens of Versailles. The show is not simply about elaborate gowns and embellished silk slippers, but about how one woman cultivated an aesthetic that transformed her into the most fashionable queen in Europe – one whose legacy continues to blossom centuries after the guillotine fell.

Marie Antoinette, born in Vienna in 1755, arrived at the French court as a teenager, her head already brimming with notions of romance and beauty. Flowers became her enduring language, stitched into her gowns, woven through her hair, and perfuming her retreat at the Petit Trianon, now the site of the Fragrance Garden. They were more than adornment: they were her escape from the rigid etiquette of Versailles, a botanical rebellion expressed in silk, porcelain, and footwear.

The queen’s dresses were often rivers of fabric patterned with floral garlands. Silk weavers in Lyon, desperate to keep pace with her voracious appetite for novelty, created fabrics with garden-like complexity: roses tumbling down skirts, sprays of lilac embroidered in metallic threads, and lifelike pastel blossoms. The delicate pink cabbage rose became synonymous with her name, and she posed with a nosegay of them in many painted portraits. Even her famed “chemise à la reine,” the loose muslin gown that scandalized the court for its simplicity, was often worn with a ribbon belt embroidered with tiny violets or roses.

Shoes, too, bore the floral mark of her reign. The queen’s footwear was as elaborate as her hairstyles, and often as fragrant. Surviving examples include ivory silk mules embroidered with sprays of carnations and slippers brocaded with tulips. Manolo Blahnik, no stranger to embellishment, has described her shoes as “wearable bouquets,” each pair a small-scale triumph of craftsmanship and fantasy. His sponsorship of the London exhibition is less a commercial gesture than a courtly homage across centuries (his mother is said to have read to him from Marie Antoinette’s biography as an unconventional bedtime story).

Her obsession with flowers reached its fullest expression in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, her personal retreat outside the pomp of Versailles. There she cultivated English-style landscapes dotted with meadows of daisies and poppies, far from the manicured formality of the royal gardens. She delighted in surrounding herself with roses, lilacs, and hyacinths, often donning simple straw hats crowned with flowers to stroll among them. Portraits from this period, such as those by her favourite painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée le Brun show her not as a queen bound by protocol, but as a young woman lost in her flowers, skirts billowing like blossoms themselves.

But if flowers were her delight, they also became her political undoing. Pamphleteers mocked her “floral extravagances” as symbols of waste and excess. Her towering hairstyles, sometimes crowned with wreaths of roses, were caricatured as blooming too high, too expensive, too foreign. Even her Petit Trianon retreat, described by supporters as a fragrant idyll, was derided by critics as a floral folly built on the suffering of ordinary Parisians. Flowers, which to her were emblems of beauty and respite, became to the revolutionaries metaphors for vanity.

Yet her legacy is indelibly floral. The porcelain factories of Sèvres produced endless garden motifs for her: cups painted with violets, plates edged with cornflowers, vases sprouting garlands of roses. Perfume houses crafted scents of jasmine and orange blossom to suit her taste. Even after her death, the myth of Marie Antoinette was perfumed and petal-strewn, kept alive in romantic literature and paintings where flowers softened her fate.

The London exhibition aims to present this duality: the flowers as emblems of innocence and escape, and the flowers as accusations of decadence. Visitors will find gowns patterned with sprawling gardens, fragments of silk shoes embroidered with carnations, and personal letters in which she described her love of blossoms. Manolo Blahnik has lent several designs inspired by her floral footwear, updating her rose-trimmed slippers into stilettos that could walk the streets of Mayfair. There is even a set of fake gardening tools that were used in pastoral dramas she put on at the on-site theatre.

In one display case, a pair of her silk shoes will sit beside Blahnik’s reinterpretation: hers embroidered with roses in gilt thread, his reimagined in velvet with a single sculpted camellia perched on the toe. The juxtaposition underscores how her influence has never withered. Like the flowers she adored, her style renews itself in every age, reinterpreted by each generation of designers who see in her not just tragedy, but perennial beauty.