Holding on to “One Moment in Time.” A collection of Whitney Houston‘s belongings, including the custom lace wedding dress, will sell at auction on Friday, June 24, and Saturday, June 25, in Beverly Hills.
One hundred nineteen pieces from Houston’s estate will be up for sale. From statuettes to clothing, the items, which will be sold by Heritage Auctions, will span her entire career. “[It’s] basically a retrospective of Whitney from the beginning, from when she first started singing after she left being a background singer for Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls,” Garry Shrum, director of Entertainment and Music Memorabilia at Heritage Auctions, told Billboard. “We have her passport from the beginning, all these various awards and outfits, all kinds of cool and groovy things.”
PHOTOS: Stars Gone Too Soon
Among the coolest? Her elaborate Marc Bouwer wedding ensemble, which includes a form-fitting lace dress with beaded embellishments and a fishtail hemline, matching opera gloves and an ornate headpiece with a tiered veil. She wore the look when she married Bobby Brown in 1992.
There will also be smaller, more sentimental items up for sale, including the passport she used during her first international tours and a Disney coloring book in Japanese. “Her and Michael [Jackson], they loved Disney stuff,” Shrum said. “She colored these pages and then autographed it. To get something personal like that, it doesn’t happen very often.”
PHOTOS: Best Celebrity Wedding Dresses of All Time
The director continued, “Usually you pick up odds and ends that were given to fans and fans end up selling them with [Heritage Auctions], but when you get something from the estate, it’s so personal and it has such strong provenance and the backstories that the family has given us to put with the pieces are even more exciting.”
Shrum predicts that all of the items will sell for about $500,000 or more. A portion of the proceeds will be sent to the charity of the Houston family’s choosing.
