The British public were invited Friday to share Margaret Thatcher's "secret
passion" for fashion ahead of a sale of clothes worn by the former premier known
as the 'Iron Lady'.
London's Christie's auction house will put the clothes under the hammer on
Tuesday.
It is also selling 200 personal items belonging to Britain's only female
premier, in an online auction that runs until Wednesday.
The lots, owned by Thatcher's family, could fetch a combined total of around
£500,000 ($760,000, 700,000 euros), Orlando Rock, president of Christie's UK,
told AFP.
The auction house is used to dealing with works of art that regularly sell
for more than ten times that amount.
"It is quite unusual for us that the vast majority of lots are affordable to
a very, very large number of people," said Rock.
Some of the most famous items, including the dresses she wore when first
meeting Nelson Mandela and when dancing with Ronald Reagan, went on public
display at Christie's on Friday.
photo: backless formal
dresses
The auctioneer said the collection would give "unique insights into the 'Iron
Lady'."
"She had a secret passion for clothes," curator Meredith Etherington-Smith
said of Thatcher, a dressmaker's daughter born Margaret Hilda Roberts in
Grantham, central England, in 1925.
"From a very young age, she and her sister used to make clothes," she
added.
"When she became the first woman prime minister she used clothes as a way of
emphasising her power.
"Every time there was a photo opportunity, she was beautifully dressed,
immaculately coiffured, with a nice handbag, and she looked what she was: a
powerful person."
Historic lots include the blue suit she wore in a 1990 parliament debate on
the expansion of the European Monetary Union, in which she uttered the now
immortal line: "No. No. No."
Thatcher went to great lengths to ensure she wore colours appropriate to any
country she was visiting -- green, a symbol of hope, in Poland, and blue and
cream in Israel to mirror the country's flag.
"It was all very carefully thought-out," said Etherington-Smith.
"At her party conferences, she always wore a very sharp blue suit," the
colour of her Conservative Party.
"She never wore red in the UK because that's the colour of socialism but she
did wear it in America because that's the colour of Ronald Reagan's Republican
party," the curator said.
Her "special relationship" with US president and fellow free-market reformer
Reagan is a focal point of the collection.
Items include a statue of a bald eagle, the symbol of the United States that
Reagan gave her as a gift, which is expected to sell for between £5,000 and
£8,000.
One of the most emblematic pieces is the iconic red leather briefcase that
contained the prime minister's confidential documents, which is expected to
fetch between £3,000 and £5,000.
Other items include signed copies of some of her most famous speeches, her
wedding dress, her handbags -- which used to strike fear into colleagues during
cabinet meetings -- and jewellery.
The items, proceeds of which will go to her children and grandchildren, were
initially offered to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the world's
largest museum of decorative arts and design, but they decided against showing
them.
Thatcher was in power from 1979 to 1990. Her privatisations and deregulation
helped turn around Britain's ailing economy.
But she remains a divisive figure, particularly in Britain's hard-hit
working-class heartlands.
see also: school formal
dresses