Diana’s dress? Marie-Antoinette’s gilded chair? Collectors are weird
Collectibles. If there’s one noun that makes my heart sink it’s collectibles. Thimbles, watches, Clarice Cliff, frocks worn by long-departed royals.
It’s not that I dislike any of these things per se, it’s just I don’t have the collector’s gene, the one that drives someone to buy something and then buy another thing that looks almost the same or has similar provenance.
On Sunday, a 1980s black velvet Jacques Azagury dress once worn by Diana, Princess of Wales was sold for a record-breaking £904,000 at auction. Last week, a gilded chair from Marie Antoinette’s boudoir fetched almost £2.2million at Sotheby’s.
I get that these are “asset-class” investments, like Old Masters, and maybe if I had “sufficient class” I might understand the appeal, but to me it just seems really weird.
My exception to this rule is fridge magnets but that’s because I see them as an aide memoire-cum-visual travelogue. Plus, when the children were little they could spend an entire week in Italy excitedly hunting down and choosing the perfect magnet (just the one) which saved me more than a few quid when it came to holiday expenditure.
But, it’s at Christmas that I breathe a deep sigh of relief. Friends who are known to have a fondness for rabbits or interesting teapots are invariably inundated with the most shocking tat.
“I sometimes find myself recoiling in horror when I see what tasteless garbage I’m given,” sighs my bunny friend (whom I won’t name here in case it sets her rellies off again). “I like interesting antiques and old book illustrations of rabbits and hares; Albrecht Dürer rather than Watership Down.
“Instead I get inundated with nasty cheap mugs, resin models – and, two years ago, a cross-stitch kit to make my own rabbit cushion cover. I’m a 51-year-old academic. Do these people think I’m a half-wit?”
Worse still, there’s an expectation that she will keep them on public display so that when members of her wider family visit and fail to see the Peter Rabbit plushie they gave her, eyebrows are raised.
It goes without saying that I am married to a man who collects. Of course, I am. There have been many phases (the high risk of PTSD flashbacks preclude me from going into detail about the model tank years).
These days, it’s mostly CDs to add to the 10,000 he already owns and eye-wateringly obscure books – at the risk of sounding like a philistine, how many accounts of The Thirty Years’ War does one man need? – which is very much the acceptable, respectable face of collecting.
When I recently wailed that I would like just one wall in the house that isn’t shelved, floor to ceiling, he countered by pointing out I have “too many coats” and “pairs of shoes that never get worn” and that it technically makes me a hoarder. Ouch.
No prizes for guessing who’s absolutely not getting a rare copy of The Second Scottish Wars of Independence 1332-1363 for Christmas.
