Luxury shoe house underscores its cultural cachet with headline museum partnership
In a high-profile cultural collaboration, Manolo Blahnik is set to sponsor Marie Antoinette Style, a landmark exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum that opens September 20 and runs through March 22. This marks a significant cultural collaboration for the heritage footwear house, underscoring its long-standing affinity for historical elegance, theatricality, and craft.
The exhibition will explore the life and enduring influence of Marie Antoinette—the Austrian-born queen whose style came to define an era. With over 250 objects on view, including loans from the Château de Versailles never before seen outside France, the show offers an intimate look at the world she constructed and adorned. Items on display include richly embroidered court dress fragments, jewels from her private collection, a dinner service from the Petit Trianon, and the final note she wrote before her execution.
Blahnik’s involvement is both fitting and strategic. The designer, whose shoes have long drawn on historical silhouettes and ornate detailing, famously created footwear for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette—a project that reimagined the queen’s story in candy-colored tones and decadent textures. Shoes from that cinematic collaboration, which married 18th-century grandeur with modern whimsy, will also be featured in the show alongside contemporary fashion from brands such as Dior, Chanel, Moschino, and Vivienne Westwood—each bearing witness to Marie Antoinette’s continued influence on fashion and popular culture.
For Manolo Blahnik, this partnership is more than a tribute, but a brand statement. Aligning with a major institutional exhibition allows the house to further entrench itself in the cultural narrative of design history while appealing to a fashion-literate global audience. It also situates Blahnik not just as a maker of beautiful shoes, but as a custodian of beauty and heritage, reinforcing the label’s status as a maison of intellectual and aesthetic depth.
The V&A, for its part, is framing the show not only as a retrospective of royal style but as an exploration of Marie Antoinette’s broader design legacy. The show presents the queen not only as a style icon of her time, but as an enduring symbol of spectacle and influence. Through multisensory installations—incorporating some of the queen’s favorite perfumes—the museum intends to immerse visitors in the opulence and mythology of her world.
Manolo Blahnik’s sponsorship is a well-calibrated move. It taps into the growing appetite for storytelling in the luxury space, while reinforcing the brand’s mastery of craft and its poetic engagement with history. With this sponsorship, Blahnik isn’t just dressing icons of the past—he is reanimating their legacy for the fashion vanguard of today.
