In London, the V&A’s latest blockbuster fashion exhibition, the hotly anticipated “Marie Antoinette Style,” feels almost like a séance. It has everything you would expect from a no-holds-barred, couture-filled reassessment of the extravagant French queen—the pomp and circumstance, stunning gowns, shimmering jewels, impossibly elegant furnishings, luminous portraiture, items which have never before left Versailles—but, even more remarkably, it manages to conjure her spirit, in all its complexity.

“Marie Antoinette’s legacy is obviously most pronounced in fashion and style, and that was the case in her own time, too,” the exhibition’s curator, Dr. Sarah Grant, tells me, ahead of the opening of the showcase. “There was also the decorative arts, music, gardening—so many other areas of her p

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