Once in a generation a museum fails to grab a masterpiece and regrets the choice for ever. In the 1920s, the Louvre missed the chance to purchase Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and thus allowed one of Picasso’s greatest paintings to go to New York and become a treasure of the Museum of Modern Art. Now, the V&A has rejected an opportunity to add another kind of modern masterpiece to its collection – the outfits of Margaret Thatcher.
The museum has said it politely declined the offer of Thatcher’s clothes because it “is responsible for chronicling fashionable dress, and its collecting policy tends to focus on acquiring examples of outstanding aesthetic or technical quality”. But this does not follow. The V&A has snubbed the chance to exhibit a dark icon of modern cultural history. Surely, the clothes that defined Thatcherism are just as historically important as David Bowie’s platform heels or Alexander McQueen’s corsets?
The late photographer Helmut Newton would certainly disagree with the V&A’s curators about Thatcher’s status as a fashion symbol. Newton claimed that photographing the formidable Conservative prime minister was the scariest assignment he ever got. He made her look steely, authoritative, cold and magnificent – every centimetre the embodiment of “sado-monetarism”.
Newton, famous for his black-and-white images of sado-masochist scenarios, recognised that Thatcher belonged in the same imaginative universe as his sensualised fashion shots. The V&A is missing a trick here. In recent years it has become ever more adept at merging high art and popular culture and exploring fashion as the clothing of the collective unconscious. So why not stage a show called Margaret Thatcher Is ...?
Thatcher’s image was remade in and by power: in the 1970s, as education minister and when running for the Conservative leadership, she was seen as a “housewife” – and played up to this cosy patriarchal notion. But as “Thatcherism” took shape, she was seen more and more as a Newtonesque power figure, a Boudicca of the right, administering “handbaggings” that tellingly associate her “feminine” accessories with harsh violent discipline.
The shock of monetarism became impossible for some men to separate from the horror of being subordinate to a woman. It was the male Tory cabinet who created the image of Thatcher as dominatrix. Christopher Hitchens claimed it was rooted in reality – for in his memoirs he claims Mrs Thatcher once “spanked” him in the House of Commons.
The V&A is being dishonest about its own collections. Sure, it has Chanel dresses but it also has a jumpsuit worn on stage by Mick Jagger, a poster for a Lou Reed concert, a pair of Byzantine slippers and thousands more items that mix aesthetic, historic and cultural value.
It is clearly not the venue for a Thatcher shrine – but there are genuine cultural reasons to exhibit her accoutrements. She really was a style icon in the 1980s and her clothes do have a deep resonance with all that happened in that defining decade – and all that she made happen.
It does not matter if you love or loathe her: Thatcher made contemporary Britain what it is. It is mean to deny the historical significance of her suits and handbags – a narrow ideological decision. Margaret Thatcher is more important than David Bowie, and to pretend otherwise makes the V&A look prejudiced and trivial.
