Marie Antoinette (1755 to 1793) is a cultural icon of monumental proportions. She was the last queen of France before the brutal and bloody French Revolution, and her life was ended by the revolutionaries’ guillotine blade.

Her legacy courses through the visual language of music videos, fashion catwalks and drag shows. Even the shapes and styles behind the current corset trend, popularised by the show Bridgerton, owe more to the era of the French queen than to the Netflix regency romp.

Yet, standing in front of a single, gently worn, and very small shoe at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style, the French queen suddenly feels as fragile and little as the brittle silk of her surviving heeled pump.

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It is the tender fragility of the teenage queen that first greets visitors. The 16-year-old Dauphine smiles coyly in an animated version of Joseph-Siffred Duplessis’s 1772 portrait of the future queen. She is strikingly innocent, entirely oblivious to the tumultuous years which would define her legacy. It is a poignant moment for all who are aware of her tragic fate.

Joyful and incandescent youthfulness thrums from the first few spaces of the exhibition. A glittering mirrored hall filled with some of the most spectacular gowns of the period pulses with magical energy as a ball in Versailles’s hall of mirrors. The gowns that the visitor encounters, like the wedding ensemble of fellow European royal bride, Duchess Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta, are tiny.

This is not, as many visitors may mumble, because everyone in the past was small (they were not), but because this was a court of teenage royals.

The garments chosen are a spectacular array of pastels, representing the diversity and complexity of styles worn at the French court. But these glistening, dazzling garments pale in comparison to the fragments of gowns which possibly once belonged to Marie Antoinette herself. Other than the shoes, a shift (the linen underwear worn closest to the skin) and a smattering of accessories, very few of Marie Antoinette’s own garments survive.

The revolutionaries who oversaw her downfall and execution in 1793 attempted to destroy her vast wardrobe. So fragments like the ivory silk one, encrusted with silver spangles, gems, velvet and metal embroidery are incredibly exciting. The scars of stitching from its former life as a court gown tantalisingly hint at how it might have formed the sweeping front section of a gown’s skirts.

The exhibition confidently places Marie Antoinette not as an exuberant and frivolous monarch, as she is so often seen, but as an intentional, frequently playful, and decidedly modern patron of the arts. Aside from the gowns, there is furniture, porcelain, jewellery, theatre props and some of the most recognisable and iconic portraits of the infamous French queen – many of which have never travelled to the UK before. It is in this section that the fervour of her celebrity becomes apparent.

Read more: Marie Antoinette – extravagant French queen has long been a symbol of female excess

There is a bowl supposedly modelled after Marie Antoinette’s breast, complete with nipple, and which it is said is the origin of the coupe glass. There are also an astonishing amount of diamonds, including a copy of the jewels from the infamous affair of the diamond necklace. This audacious con saw a cardinal and a self proclaimed Comtesse steal a priceless necklace while posing as Marie Antoinette. Despite the Queen’s innocence, her reputation is ruined.

It is here that the darker side of her reign also begins to trickle into the exhibition. Her expenses were nowhere near as detrimental to the French economy as her husband’s warmongering, but Antoinette’s very visible and enviably luxurious life earned her the moniker of Madame Déficit. She became an easy target for an angry and starving population, who began to vilify her, depicting her as a harpy and falsely accusing her of torrid affairs.

This insidious shift is cleverly woven into the exhibition narrative. For instance, there is an opportunity for visitors to smell samples of the scents from the court by sniffing perfumed busts of the Queen’s head. Visitors enjoying the scents are then suddenly assaulted with the stench of her impending prison cell.

Marie Antoinette was not oblivious to the rising revolutionary tide. That innocent girl that we met at the start had grown into a sympathetic queen. She recycled her garments, gifting them to her staff, she adopted and released enslaved children, she gave endlessly to charities and turned down gifts which she felt were too extravagant.

And while her luxury consumption looked extravagant, her patronage was essential to the success of French industry. When she stopped wearing silks and turned her attention to simple cotton gowns, for instance, the silk weavers rioted. She was never going to win.

Despite these warning signs, it is impossible to prepare for the next space. The dominance of pastel pinks and greens is quickly supplanted by a deep, blood red. A blade from a guillotine dominates the space cut a few words of repetition here. But her death is not the end.

The remaining rooms celebrate her enduring appeal across art, culture and fashion. She was a fancy dress costume within decades of her death, and by the 20th century cinematic portrayals like Norma Shearer’s 1938 portrayal of the Queen cemented her pop culture position. But her legacy, fraught with misogynistic myth-making and uncomfortable stereotypes, gets lost in a celebratory atmosphere.

It is undeniable that her cultural significance is massive. But so many of the visual signals designers nod to are just as false as the fake news generated during her fall from grace. For instance, the tall white wigs are a Hollywood invention. Marie Antoinette always wore her own, natural blonde hair pristinely pomaded and powdered.

It is disappointing that, while the myth-making from her lifetime is robustly challenged in the exhibition, the perpetuation of those myths in artistic responses to her legacy were largely overlooked. In this section, the fashion of John Galliano or costumes from the 2006 Sophia Coppola film or Hulu’s The Great, while wonderful to see, lacked the deeper critical engagement of the early sections of the exhibition.

The exhibition is a visual treat, and the opportunity to see rarely displayed objects make it a must see. But the imagined Marie Antoinette we leave at the end of the exhibition is a far cry from the real young woman that smiled shyly as we entered. Marie Antoinette may be immortalised in the cultural imagination, but I am not convinced she would recognise herself.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Serena Dyer, De Montfort University

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Serena Dyer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.