“The V&A politely declined the offer of Baroness Thatcher’s clothes, feeling that these records of Britain’s political history were best suited to another collection which would focus on their intrinsic social historical value,” a spokesperson from the Victoria & Albert Museum told the Telegraph on Monday. “The museum is responsible for chronicling fashionable dress and its collecting policy tends to focus on acquiring examples of outstanding aesthetic or technical quality.” The close reader marvels: fifty-seven words and nearly each one of them spring-loaded with unassailably punctilious contempt. The statement was less a press release than a model of passive aggression. Who says “politely” when he is being polite? As an elegant variation, “these records of Britain’s political history” fairly screamed “hideous polyester rags.” Since the museum was charged with “chronicling fashionable dress,” and it was sadly unable—a matter of policy, you see—to make room for Baroness Thatcher’s looks, then Baroness Thatcher, it was saying without exactly saying, must have been categorically unfashionable. In the second half of the sentence, the museum twisted the fish knife again: not only were her clothes dowdy, they weren’t even nicely made. You couldn’t fail to understand the meaning of “best suited to another collection.” Thatcher’s double-breasted crepe suits were, in fashion terms, unclubbable. The application didn’t get lost. Her wardrobe had been blackballed.
The V&A’s outspokenness about the matter, which was apparently discussed several years ago, was refreshing. But its explanation was less than wholly persuasive. O.K., Thatcher’s pussycat-bowed blouses were perhaps not the ermine-trimmed mantles of the tsars or the jewel-encrusted finery of the maharajas, both subjects of V&A exhibits, but was her taste really any worse than Kylie Minogue’s, whose gold hot pants the museum put on display in 2007? Even the most committed critic of Thatcher has to admit that she put herself together with some flair. One of the outfits in the lot that the V&A rejected was her wedding dress, in blue velvet with a sweetheart neckline and long sleeves, made by Constance Suits and Gowns of Old Bexley. At Wesley’s Chapel in 1951, she wore with it a matching muff and a soft-brimmed cap whose curled ostrich feathers resembled a dirty mop stuck on the side of the head, and she still looked smashing.
Thatcher was as unbeloved by the museum world as she was by most people working in the public sector. (As a Museums Association publication noted after her death, “Thatcher was no friend of museums and by the end of her reign in 1990, many publicly funded museums were in crisis after years of neglect.”) Maybe the V&A didn’t feel like dealing with what would surely be a divisive venture, both among its staff and with the public. (In a press screening of the 2012 film “The Iron Lady,” after the scene in which Thatcher loses the leadership of the Conservative Party, someone stood up and screamed, “You’re on your own now, bitch!”) Or maybe the public snubbing of her clothes amounted to long-awaited retribution, a fuck-you that had taken decades to deploy. Either way, the affront was noticed. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, said that he thought the clothes belonged at the museum. “Shame the V&A has turned down Thatcher’s personal collection,” the Business Secretary Sajid Javid wrote on Twitter. “I for one would have loved to see it!”
I’d like to think, though, that something more principled was at play in the museum’s rejection of the offer. Perhaps the powers that be, whatever their ideological orientations, were wary of the process by which complicated political legacies are aestheticized through clothing. Perhaps, for them, the Thatcher years ought to amount to something more than nostalgia, a reference, or a mood. We think that there is something comical about Kim Jong-Il, ahistorical as this is, because he had a pompadour and wore jumpsuits. We’re still harping on Hillary’s headbands. It is easier for us to remember Jacques Chirac—as it is for the French hipsters who have taken him up as an icon of “smooth pimping”—for his tortoise-shell glasses and his slicked back hair and his cashmere cable-knit sweaters, draped over the shoulders, than it is for us to assess multipolarisme. (I would gladly see an exhibit of Bernadette Chirac’s outfits, but that’s another story.) In this tale, the emperor has clothes, and we’re too busy looking at them to figure out what else she’s been up to.
The would-be donors of the Thatcher collection are the executors of her will—her son Mark, her daughter Carole, and her two grandchildren. Having been rebuffed by the V&A, they took the hoard to Christie’s, whose sale “Mrs Thatcher: Property from the Collection of The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, LG, OM, FRS” will take place in London on December 15th. The wedding ensemble is estimated at ten to fifteen thousand pounds. There’s a Kaiser bisque of a bald eagle, given to Thatcher by Ronald Reagan; a quintessentially handbaggy navy-blue leather handbag by Launer, London; the beige raincoat that she wore with goggles and a billowing silk headscarf (“with ‘Hôtel Ritz, Paris’ into the border,” the online catalogue notes) while standing on a tank near Fallingbostel, Germany in September, 1986. In response to the auction, the Margaret Thatcher Centre—a privately funded organization that, in 2019, expects to open Britain’s first version of a Presidential library—launched an emergency appeal. “We need to act now to save this unique collection for the nation and to prevent it from being broken up and sold piecemeal overseas,” its Web site read.
Donal Blaney, the centre’s chief executive, told me that the group had raised a six-figure sum within twenty-four hours. “We’re confident that we’ll be in a position to get most of it, if not all of it,” he said. Yesterday, amid the controversy, the V&A issued another press release. “The V&A is a constantly evolving institution, and if we were approached today it is perfectly possible that discussions might develop in a different direction, and we welcome public interest and debate in how we collect and how we research and display our collections to the widest audience,” it read. If the museum’s original stance was a rare Lalique corsage, this one was a strand of cultured pearls.
