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Revealed: the meticulous planning that went into Margaret Thatcher's 1987 Moscow wardrobe
When Margaret Thatcher embarked on her historic tour of the Soviet Union, her signature style was very much on show - complete with pearls, handbags and pussy-bow blouses. And while the Prime Minister sought help when planning her travel wardrobe, newly released sketches reveal she wasn’t afraid to put her own spin on her stylist’s suggestions.
The woman behind Thatcher’s ironclad outfits was another Margaret - Margaret King, the PM’s ‘dress adviser’ and a director of Aquascutum, the British fashion house. The pair first met in 1979, shortly after Thatcher became Prime Minister, when she came into Aquascutum to buy a new coat.
Their decades-long collaboration really began in 1987, when Thatcher was preparing for her trip to Moscow. ‘She needed a coat, but I wanted to do more,’ King told The Telegraph in 2013. ‘As our leader, I felt she should look absolutely devastating.’
King designed four coats - one for each day of the trip - and commissioned a dramatic, Russian-style fox-fur hat from royal milliner Philip Somerville. Her meticulous planning is visible in a set of sketches released for the first time today by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation archive.
‘The Prime Minister knew how important it was going to be, and how important it was she should look good. She was the first British prime minister to visit the Soviet Union, so it was a historic occasion,’ King added. 'She wanted the British to be proud of her and wanted to wear everything British.’
The eight sketches include style names, stock numbers and King’s choice of accessories for each outfit, including items noted to be ‘P.M’s own’. Photographs from the trip show that Thatcher made subtle changes to King’s ensembles, wearing the Somerville hat with a different coat and eschewing a hat altogether with another coat, this one in her favourite ‘Conference blue’ hue.
But it worked: King said that Thatcher rang her within two hours of returning to London to say the clothes had been ‘sensational’. The PM appeared on her first international best-dressed list in 1988. Her outfits from the Moscow trip proved so pivotal to her image that one key piece - the camel-coloured cashmere coat with stranded mink collar - sold for £30,000 at auction in 2015.
King and Thatcher worked together for the remainder of Thatcher’s time in power. Over the years she would usher Thatcher away from her favourite pussy-bow blouses and introduce colours beyond sapphire blue. But the Aquascutum suits remained a pillar of the Prime Minister’s wardrobe. ‘If Margaret trusted you to do something, that was it – she trusted you,’ King said. ‘I felt very close to her, and working with her was an amazing chapter in my life.’