Maggie’s wardrobe would never make it past today’s PC crowd
Idon’t believe for a nano second that Margaret Thatcher failed the Balmoral Test, if there is such a thing. At least not sartorially. By all accounts, the Queen goes out of her way to smooth the path for visitors and avoid embarrassment. Quiet instructions on the appropriate kit would have been issued well before the visit. Also, of the many things Maggie has been accused, idiocy wasn’t one of them. Not that you need to be a genius to work out that court shoes and flesh-coloured tights are unlikely to cut it on several thousand acres of soggy Scottish moor.
The test I think she would fail is Political Dressing 2.0. Clotheswise at least, she was too impeccable ever to be considered “relatable”. The never-outof-place hair would have its own Twitter account and be the object of much derision.
She was meticulous about getting the tone and details of her outfits absolutely right, and that took time. Today she’d be lambasted as an airhead for caring about her appearance, even though it could be put to good diplomatic ends.
Margaret King, a former director of Aquascutum who became keeper of the prime minister’s wardrobe – choosing, designing and altering many of her outfits – recalled the PM constantly turning clothes inside out to examine them. “I asked her how she knew so much about fabric and cut,” King told me when Thatcher died. “She said she got it from her mother, who was a dressmaker.”
The two Margarets met through the prime minister’s daughter-in-law, Diane, a customer at Aquascutum, and were soon working on outfits for a Moscow trip. Thatcher wowed the Kremlin. That’s when Gorbachev called her the Iron Lady (a compliment) and Thatcher began appearing on best dressed lists – in the US at least, where she was a less divisive figure than in the UK. Can you imagine any British politicians today appearing on a Best Dressed List? Or wanting to? They’d be excoriated for frivolity.
But Thatcher understood the (soft) diplomacy of good clothes and wasn’t worried that openly displaying her pleasure in them might in any way diminish people’s assessment of her intelligence. She was perfectly happy to discuss her wardrobe on breakfast television. Try asking Theresa May or Jess Phillips about their outfits and watch The Fear flicker in their eyes as they weigh up the collateral damage to their gravitas.
And the fear’s understandable, given the flak May got for wearing a pair of £995 leather Amanda Wakeley trousers. The cost. How very dare she? Even though the taxpayer wasn’t footing the bill.
The subtext of leather-gate was that May was making herself look ridiculous by wearing high fashion that was too young for her. But no one dared say that openly. So they tore in on the easy quarry – the price.
Thatcher absolutely wasn’t fashionable and didn’t aspire to be. I doubt that anyone under 60, even then, ever looked at her and thought, “I want what she’s having”. So no, she didn’t exactly reach out to the youth via her clothes. Thatcher Dressing was about being appropriate and representing her country.
Essentially, King was a personal stylist/image consultant who was always on hand to keep the PM looking immaculate, especially on TV, which has its own demands.
Today there’d probably be an outcry if word leaked that any British politician had one of those on the books, even if they paid for it out of their own pocket. The extravagance. The vanity.
Which brings us to Thatcher’s many, many pairs of Ferragamo shoes. Yikes. Foreign and pricey. Apart from M&S, which then was a byword for quality and sound housekeeping and could be considered a patriotic duty for politicians, Thatcher didn’t own a single item that could be described as high street. Any clothes that weren’t made for her were altered by Alan Spencer, Aquascutum’s tailor, so that she never looked, as King put it, “rumpled, crumpled or blobby”. She also owned – and publicly wore – some valuable jewellery. No novelty necklaces for her.
These days however, rumpled, crumpled and blobby are seen as indicators of how hard female UK MPS are working, and how seriously they take their jobs. No wonder it seems that in some ways, women have actually taken a step backwards.