Buying up to four pairs of shoes per week while her subjects were starving, France’s final queen remains both a “vacuous profligate” and a “style icon for a consumerist cult” to this day, said Laura Cumming in The Observer .

The V&A’s exhibition – the first in the UK solely devoted to her – brings together iconic pieces worn, and inspired, by Marie Antoinette: a character of haute-culture adorned with controversies.

Married at just 14 to the late-teens Sun King, Louis XVI, the young Austrian later became a spearhead of extravagance, a vision of “white cotton frocks”, “towering hair and a fresh pastel palette”. During her reign as consort, her decorative force was felt by all in France, with a “grotesque 13% of the state budget” devoured entirely by the royal family.

Even following h

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