Why Can't We Quit Her?

Too much clothing sent Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Yet the first Queen of Excess still stokes our fashion dreams— and two new exhibits salute her style. Encore, encore.

- ANNE HIGONNET

Between the $56 million Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez and the exhibition opening in September at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum on the style influence of Marie Antoinette, extravagance is in season. Sánchez wears pseudo-18th-century corsets whenever, and they appeared so often with panniered skirts on the spring couture runways—at Dior, Schiaparelli, Valentino, and Gaultier—that it looked like 2025 going on 1780. Begone, quiet luxury! You got so boring.

When Mara-Lago and the Met Gala glare brighter than Versailles and the Gilded Age, when maximalism rules again, it’s time to ponder Marie Antoinette, the first Queen of Excess.

Marie Antoinette died of too much clothing. Somehow she did not notice the social and economic forces that brought the French monarchy to the verge of collapse. She blithely discarded venerated modes of court dress in favor of the upstart Paris fashion, and abused the royal coffers to suit her newfound fancy. She fooled herself into thinking that all flamboyance is alike, but depending on the political epoch, exuberance can be effervescent—or mortally dangerous. Marie Antoinette went right on shopping her way to the guillotine, and so remains the magnifying glass through which we look at both our fashion dreams and fashion nightmares. Theories of clothing much as three feet to each side. Architects will say that we just love to build—clothing, too. The abstractions of design will cause us to cinch our waists, cantilever our shoulders, elevate our heels, inflate our heads, and otherwise override the facts of anatomy. Everyone longs for maximum structural extension, and we are transfixed by examples of its apotheosis (the gowns of Marie Antoinette no less than ancient Egypt's pharaonic statuary).