3.03.2010

IMELDA'S CLOSET

Above, Imelda Marcos's legendarily enormous collection of shoes. Scan from Dictator Style, by Peter York.
When the incoming Aquino government audited the Marcoses' quarters in Malacanang Palace in Manila they said they'd found 4,000 pairs of shoes.  Mrs. Marcos responded that this was ridiculous— she only had 1,200 or so...
[Ferdinand Marcos] had huge amounts of gold - 7,000 tons of it, a large part of the world's stock. So much, in fact, that he built walls of it at home, using it as a kind of premium brick. Unfortunately, he didn't tell Imelda. Always fussing over her interiors, Mrs. Marcos disliked the way the house was partitioned into tiny rooms, so she ordered some of the walls to be knocked down while her husband was away. The bricks were stacked in the garden, and an anxious Marcos wasted no time in retrieving them on his return.
 Peter York, in Dictator Style, on the lifestyle of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos

10 comments:

Rock Couture said...

Holy crap... To have all those shoes

Nedda Ebo said...

Oh dear. What a number.
I'm jealous, but I'm not--I wouldn't be able to keep track..
x

Anonymous said...

It honestly looks like a library of shoes!!!!

meg // morningmidnight.com said...

hot damn! and here i am jealous more of the organization than the actual shoes.

anastassia said...

That lady is so cool. I'm sure there are people out there with hundreds of shoes, but thousands. Even the shoe museum probably has less.

home before dark said...

Ah, the folly of the lack of communication between husband and wife. It would have been funnier if she had the "bricks" hauled away. Now tell me Dr. Tennenbaum, what causes such a full blown obsession with shoes on this magnitude?

(IN)DECOROUS TASTE said...

Meg- I thought the same thing.

Home before dark- If I knew, I would be able to cure what ails me. But that would be no fun.

blue1123 said...

she did have a shoe fetish. but according to the Marcos' family press secretary, most of them were sent by shoemakers from Marikina (a shoe manufacturing district in the Philippines). She was their patron of sorts, and they just kept sending her shoes. most of these were of the same style, in different colors. and some were unused. :)

Unknown said...

My dream *---*

Cynthia, Beach Coast Style said...

WOW!! that's a lot of shoes! I love shoes but I don't think I would want that many.

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