Marie Antoinette and the Blitz Kids never met, yet they shared a love of dressing up. Both made excess their armour, spectacle their shield, and performance their survival strategy. One wore powdered wigs at Versailles, the other avant-garde makeup in Covent Garden. Both became lightning rods for anxieties about authenticity.
Dressing Up
Take Marie Antoinette. Married off to Louis XVI at fourteen, she was supposed to embody majesty, virtue, and Frenchness. Instead, she came to symbolise the opposite. Her gowns grew wider, her hairpieces taller, her bills higher. Marie Antoinette was never permitted to be herself: she was a queen, and she was a woman, and the two roles collided.
The V&A’s Marie Antoinette Style exhibition shows her as France’s most fashionable queen: chiné silks, ribboned gowns, feathered poufs. Later at the Petit Trianon, she reinvented herself in muslin dresses and straw hats. Yet, her search for simplicity was denounced as masquerade. Authenticity was always denied her.
Fast forward two centuries to the Blitz Club, 1979. Here, Steve Strange policed the door like a monarch deciding who entered court. Inside, the Blitz Kids weren’t simply dressing up; they were creating selves. The Design Museum’s Blitz: The Club That Shaped the 80s exhibition showcases The Look: “All of the Blitz Kids had a look, but no two looks were the same.” Historical romance clashed with futuristic tailoring, corsetry with leather, muslin skirts with Lycra.
Matthew Worley observes that the scene “performed the multiplicity and instability of a modern self” through “elaborate modes of - sometimes fleeting, sometimes enduring - self-creation and self-reinvention”. Dressing up was the point.
The New Romantics looted history, borrowing Elizabethan ruffs, Weimar cabaret, sci-fi latex, and reassembling it into a look so bold it dared you to stare. The club was also a laboratory of gender play. Genders merged as gay/straight codes blurred and, according to Worley, “an alternative maleness” emerged. As with Marie Antoinette’s milkmaid games, this was theatre - but unlike her, the Blitz Kids turned the accusation of inauthenticity into a badge of honour.
Music and Performance
Marie Antoinette wasn’t just a fashion icon: she played the piano and harp, hosted salon concerts, and even performed on stage at her Petit Trianon theatre. The V&A show how she commissioned new works and patronised talents like Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
For the Blitz Kids, music was more central. Spandau Ballet, Visage, Ultravox and Culture Club carried the Blitz look across the globe, fusing synths and drum machines with the visual power of music videos. Record sleeves became as important as the songs. If Versailles had the salon concert, the Blitz had Top of the Pops.
Hair, Makeup, and Scent
At Versailles, celebrity hairdresser Monsieur Léonard engineered Marie Antoinette’s vertiginous coiffures - complete with feathers, ships, and allegories of smallpox inoculation. Perfume was both necessary and political: lavender, rose water, even a “Conciergerie Cell” fragrance are used by the V&A to evoke how scent shaped her world.
At the Blitz, makeup was equally transformative. Inspired by Bowie and Bolan, men and women painted their faces into living artworks. In ‘Fade to Grey’, Visage turned maquillage into manifesto. Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium or Kouros lingered in the air, announcing identities as powerfully as any costume.
Hats, Jewellery, Interiors
The V&A dubs Antoinette the “Queen of Sparkle,” showcasing glittering jewels and feathered headdresses, from towering poufs to the infamous statement piece of the diamond necklace affair. Hats and accessories completed her look, signalling both rank and rebellion.
The Blitz Kids embraced the same theatricality: Stephen Jones’s millinery crowned Boy George in Britannia plumes, whilst oversized bows and Celtic-inspired jewellery blurred heritage with irony.
Interiors mattered too. Antoinette remade the Petit Trianon as a pastoral idyll, just as art-school Blitz Kids reimagined their own spaces with bricolage furniture and borrowed stately home aesthetics for music videos.
THEM, the They, and the Queen of Authenticity?
In 1976, cultural commentator Peter York sketched a group of aesthetes bound by style and excess, calling them Them. Proto-Blitz influencers, perhaps - but also resonant of Heidegger’s Das Man - “the They,” who distract themselves with chatter and spectacle in avoidance of the inevitable finality of life.
Whilst the Blitz Kids’ obsessive self-fashioning could look like distraction, Versailles was Das Man incarnate, its court rituals suffocating individuality. Marie Antoinette’s rustic retreat was a bid to escape “the They,” but ridicule pulled her back. Yet at her trial and execution, stripped of silks and ceremony, she confronted death directly. In Heidegger’s sense, that was authenticity at last.
Excess of Style?
Perhaps what most connects these two unlikely fellows is being too much? Antoinette’s silks and jewels scandalised a starving France. The Blitz Kids’ sequins shimmered against Thatcherite austerity. Both were mocked: caricaturists lampooned Antoinette’s towering coiffures and sexual dalliances; TV satire ridiculed New Romantic excess.
Cultural critics often dismiss surface as shallow. Dick Hebdige argued that subcultural style encodes resistance (1979), while others saw New Romantic fashions as commercial spectacle (Stratton, 2022). Both apply here: Antoinette’s fashion experiments and the Blitz Kids’ style performances were not frivolity but strategies of selfhood.
The Mask as the Self
Maybe this is why the Blitz crowd looked back as much as forward. “New styles. New shapes. New modes,” Visage sang in 1981. “Reflex styles: past, future, in extreme.” Marie Antoinette could have sung the same.
Marie Antoinette’s perceived inauthenticity became a political liability. Revolutionary propaganda cast her as “l’Autrichienne,” a foreign, frivolous figure, whose extravagance embodied the corruption of monarchy. Her image was less her own creation than a battleground for public anxieties about gender, nationality, and sovereignty.
The New Romantics, conversely, turned accusations of superficiality into a prize. Their refusal of “realism” - whether in fashion, music, or nightlife - constituted a creative resistance to economic decline and the narrowing of cultural possibilities. In their subcultural context, artifice itself became authentic.
The juxtaposition of Marie Antoinette and the Blitz Kids demonstrates how authenticity is historically contingent, policed through cultural norms, and deeply entangled with performance. Whilst Marie Antoinette was condemned for failing to embody a prescribed authenticity, the New Romantics redefined authenticity itself as the freedom to invent and inhabit aesthetic personae. Both, however, illuminate the persistent tension between identity, performance, and the cultural demand for the “real.”
Whether or not Marie Antoinette ever uttered the words, “let them eat cake”, the V&A will profit from sales of Ladurée macarons, just as the Design Museum will benefit from the ‘collectability’ of its store’s retro-inspired Blitz Club t-shirts.
Both stories underline a paradox: when culture demands authenticity, the most authentic act may be to embrace artifice. The queen who played at being a shepherdess, the club kids who dressed as futuristic dandies - both remind us that the mask isn’t the opposite of the self.
In an age when we are all curating identities on Instagram and TikTok, their lesson feels sharper than ever. Should we be searching for the ‘real self’ behind the mask? Or is history prophecy and the mask the true self?
References
Design Museum (2025). Blitz: The Club That Shaped the 80s [Exhibition]. London: Design Museum.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Harper & Row.
Stratton, J. (1990) Spectacle, Fashion and the Dancing Experience in Britain, 1960–1990 (London, 2022).
Victoria and Albert Museum (2025). Marie Antoinette Style [Exhibition]. London: V&A.
Worley, M. (2024). ‘Past! Future! In Extreme!: Looking for Meaning in the “New Romantics,” 1978–82’. Journal of British Studies, 63(3), pp. 542–567. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.57
York, P. (1976). ‘Them’. Harpers & Queen, September.
Image Credits:
Photomontage of my images of a portrait of Marie Antoinette in a muslin dress after Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (c.1783) taken at the V&A (left) and Andy Ronson’s photograph of Boy George wearing Britannia (1980) taken at the Design Museum (right).