Imelda Romualdez Marcos (; born Imelda Remedios Visitación Trinidad Romuáldez; July 2, 1929) is a Filipino politician who was First Lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, wielding significant political power after her husband Ferdinand Marcos placed the country under martial law in September 1972.
During her husband's 21-year rule, Imelda Marcos ordered the construction of many grandiose architectural projects, using public funds and "in impossibly short order" – a propaganda practice, She and her husband stole billions of pesos amassing a personal fortune estimated to have been worth to by the time they were deposed in 1986; by 2018, about $3.6 billion of this had been recovered by the Philippine government, She spent much of her time abroad on state visits, hosting extravagant parties, and indulging in expensive shopping sprees, spending much of the State's money on her personal art, jewelry and shoe collections – amassing 3,000 pairs of shoes. The subject of dozens of court cases around the world, she was eventually convicted of corruption charges in 2018 for her activities during her term as governor of Metro Manila; the case is under appeal. She and her husband hold the Guinness World Record for the "Greatest Robbery of a Government", putting Suharto of neighboring Indonesia at second.
The People Power Revolution in February 1986 unseated the Marcoses and forced the family into exile in Hawaii. In 1991, President Corazon Aquino allowed the Marcos family to return to the Philippines to face various charges after the 1989 death of Ferdinand. Imelda Marcos was elected four times to the House of Representatives of the Philippines, and ran twice for the presidency of the Philippines but failed to garner enough votes.
Early life
thumb|left|175px|Imelda's father, Vicente Orestes Romuáldez
Imelda Remedios Visitación Romuáldez was born at dawn in San Miguel, Manila, on July 2, 1929. Her parents were Vicente Orestes Romuáldez, a lawyer, and his second wife, María Remedios Trinidad who was born and raised in Baliwag, Bulacan. Imelda is the sixth of Vicente's eleven children, and Remedios' firstborn. Her paternal great-grandfather was Fray Francisco Miguel López Silgado, a Spanish friar and silversmith from Granada, Andalusia, who became the parish priest of Pandacan in Manila.
Born into the Romualdez political dynasty from the province of Leyte, Imelda grew up in a wealthy clan of devout Catholics. She was baptized in the nearby San Miguel Church on the day after her birth.
Notable members of Imelda's family include the clan matriarch Doña Trinidad López de Romuáldez; her uncle Norberto Romualdez, who was a Supreme Court Associate Justice; and her younger brother Benjamin "Kokoy" Romualdez, who served as Governor of Leyte and later as an ambassador under the regime of Imelda's husband, Ferdinand Marcos.
At the time of her birth, the Romuáldez clan were wealthy, until around 1932 when the fortune of Imelda's family began to decline.
During this time her cousin Loreto Ramos introduced her to Adoración Reyes, a teacher from the College of Music and Fine Arts of Philippine Women's University (PWU), who gave her vocal lessons and a chance to get a PWU scholarship. She later sang three songs at a performance with her cousin Loreto at Holy Ghost College (now named College of the Holy Spirit Manila).
Imelda also joined the 1953 Miss Manila beauty pageant. The results became controversial, resulting in both Imelda and Miss Norma Jiménez being declared Manila's candidate to the larger Miss Philippines pageant. Both of them eventually lost to Miss Cristina Galang.
Courtship and marriage
Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos met on April 6, 1954, during a budget hearing at the Philippine Congress. Ferdinand was part of the opposition team who led the argument against the budget, while Imelda was there to visit her cousin Daniel, who was the Speaker of the House. During a recess, Imelda caught Ferdinand's eye, and he asked his journalist friend Jose Guevara of The Manila Times to introduce him to Imelda. At that time, Ferdinand already knew of Imelda. Imelda, on the other hand, knew very little of Ferdinand Marcos. After comparing heights and confirming that he was at least an inch taller than her, Ferdinand sought the help of Guevara to pursue Imelda in marriage. This whirlwind courtship lasted only eleven days.
During Holy Week of that year, Ferdinand visited Imelda's house, and when Imelda claimed that she planned to spend the holidays in Baguio, Ferdinand and Guevara offered her a ride up to Daniel's family mansion where she planned to stay, while the two booked a room in nearby Pines. For the remainder of that Holy Week, Ferdinand showered Imelda with flowers and gifts and visited her daily, prodding her to sign the marriage license that sealed the agreement. On April 16, 1954, Good Friday, after having been jokingly asked by Guevara if she wanted to be "the First Lady of the Land someday", Imelda finally agreed to sign it. On April 17, 1954, Ferdinand and Imelda were secretly married by a reluctant Francisco Chanco, a judge befriended by Ferdinand who lived in the area. The church wedding followed only after receiving the blessing of Vicente Orestes, Imelda's father, which Ferdinand asked via telegram on Easter Sunday. Their wedding was held on May 1, 1954, at the San Miguel Pro-Cathedral in Manila where Imelda was christened.
The marriage meant that Ferdinand's common-law wife, Carmen Ortega of La Union's Ortega political clan, with whom he had already sired three children, had to be quietly removed from the public eye.
1965 presidential campaign
thumb|Imelda Marcos with President Ferdinand Marcos and family during the [[First inauguration of Ferdinand Marcos|1965 inauguration]]
It was during the 1965 campaign that Imelda became influential as a political figure at the national level, supporting her husband’s political tactics through her charismatic appeal and youth. Crowds of working-class Filipinos came out in droves to Marcos campaigns because they wanted to see the "beautiful wife of Marcos".
It was in this period that Imelda described herself – a neophyte transitioning into a true political partner to her husband – as "a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon". This led one foreign journalist to call her "the iron butterfly".
Imelda had assumed a managerial position in her husband's campaign early on when Marcos faced his first challenge, which was to win the presidential candidacy for the Nacionalista Party. She enthusiastically ran a detailed campaign, befriending the 1,347 delegates of the Nacionalista Party Convention until Ferdinand Marcos won the party’s presidential nomination on November 21, 1964, for the Nacionalista Party.
McCoy recounts that it was supposedly also Imelda who convinced Fernando Lopez to accept the vice-presidential nomination alongside Marcos. She met Lopez personally, appealing to him by recounting the many struggles she and Ferdinand faced during the campaign. Lopez refused to give in multiple times, until Imelda cried in front of him. When he relented, Imelda proceeded to hand a document to sign, stating that he had accepted the nomination as the Nacionalista vice-presidential candidate. in a bid to change the perception that she was just another "politician's wife".
Inauguration
thumb|Imelda Marcos at the [[Bataan Death March Memorial]]
Ferdinand Marcos was elected as the 10th president of the Philippines on November 9, 1965. When he was inaugurated on December 30, 1965, Imelda officially became the First Lady.
The Romualdez clan had been torn apart by the presidential campaign. To fix this, Imelda allegedly sent out invitations to family members, some of whom supported the opposing party, and told them they were all welcome at their house on Ortega Street in San Juan, which was then part of Rizal.
Ferdinand and Imelda held Mass in the courtyard of their house on Ortega Street before proceeding to Luneta Park for the inauguration ceremonies.
At night, a state dinner hosted 60 guests in the reception hall of the Malacañang Palace.
Early projects
In the first three years of being First Lady, she spent for the beautification of the Paco Park and for the beautification of Fort Santiago.
In May 1966, Imelda pushed a twelve million peso plan to pool together the social welfare efforts of several dozen social welfare groups. The plan involved the construction of welfare villages and the reorientation of personnel to staff them. The cornerstone for first village, the Reception and Study Center in Quezon City was laid in 1966, and several more were built from then until 1968: Marilla Hills in Alabang, the Children's Orphanage in Pasay, the Molave Village in Tanay, Rizal, a Home for the Aged in Quezon City, and the Philippine Village at Manila International Airport.
In mid-1967, Imelda started the "Share for Progress" Seed Dispersal Program a project that suggested making vegetable gardens out of idle lots all over the country. By 1968, 309,392 kits containing seeds had been distributed in over 1500 towns.
Blue Ladies
The "Blue Ladies", a group initially composed of wives of political men in the Nacionalista Party, had played a critical role during Marcos's 1965 campaign. They contributed funds and provided publicity, giving the campaign a personal touch by visiting factories and farms to shake hands and have small conversations with voters, making door-to-door appeals in the slum areas. That year they also introduced to politics the purchase of radio and television time, to campaign for Marcos, through the use of little speeches for the voters. This was affordable because the Blue Ladies were mostly prominent matrons and/or beautiful youthful girls married to men of means.
Increased independence
The Dovie Beams scandal, which began as rumors in the late 1960s, eventually led to a significant change in Imelda's public role. President Marcos had met the American actress after she arrived in Manila in 1968 to play the female lead in Maharlika, a propaganda film portraying Ferdinand's supposed exploits during World War II. According to Beams, the two had an affair and she was moved into one of Ferdinand's safe houses,
In 1971, Imelda attended Iran's 2,500-year celebration of the Persian Empire of the founding of the Persian Empire. This trip, according to palace insiders, provided her with a social introduction to some of the world's wealthiest people.
Accusation of bribery in Constitutional Convention
On May 19, 1972, the Constitutional Convention delegate for Leyte's first district, Eduardo Quintero, accused Imelda and thirteen others of bribing some of the convention members to vote against provisions which would have prevented Marcos from retaining power beyond the two four-year terms allowed him by the previous constitution. She secured the Miss Universe 1974 pageant in Manila, which required the construction of the Folk Arts Theater in less than three months. She organized the Kasaysayan ng Lahi, a festival showcasing Philippine history. She also initiated social programs, such as the Green Revolution, which was intended to address hunger by encouraging the people to plant produce in household gardens, and created a national family-planning program.
In 1972, she took control of the distribution of a bread ration called Nutribun, which actually came from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Stabbing attack
An assassination attempt against Imelda Marcos occurred on December 7, 1972, when an assailant named Carlito Dimahilig tried to stab her on live television with a bolo knife in Nayong Pilipino but was shot by the police. Congressman Jose Aspiras and Linda Amor Robles were also injured in trying to subdue the attacker.
Foreign relations roles
In 1972, Imelda Marcos initiated the first of many trips to the Soviet Union; it was dubbed as "cultural missions" but eventually led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Philippines.
In 1975, after the assassination of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Marcos wanted to extend the official condolences. Women were not welcome in the Saudi court, but Imelda, through her connection to the surgeon who previously performed a heart surgery on the new king, managed to be the first woman guest to be honored.
In 1978, she was also appointed as Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary, allowing her to tour the United States, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Cuba. Throughout her travels, she became friends with Richard Nixon, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Josip Broz Tito. She traveled to Iraq to secure oil and to Libya for a peace treaty with the Moro National Liberation Front.
As First Lady, she frequently represented the Philippines abroad, describing her efforts as part of a broader mission to present the nation’s resilience and the strength of its people on the world stage.
Governor of Metro Manila
In 1975, Ferdinand Marcos issued Presidential Decree 824, establishing the Metro Manila Commission (MMC), the central government of Metro Manila. He named Imelda to head it, making her Governor of Metro Manila from that point until the Marcoses were deposed in 1986. From February 17 to June 12, 1978, Imelda took a leave of absence from the governorship to campaign for a seat in the Interim Batasang Pambansa, with Ferdinand Marcos serving as acting governor during that period.
Chairperson of the National Commission on the Role of the Filipino Women (NCRFW)
When the Philippine President enacted Presidential Decree No. 633 or the law that established the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW) on January 7, 1975, Imelda Marcos was appointed as the first Chairperson.
Minister of Human Settlements
Ferdinand Marcos appointed Imelda to the position of Minister of Human Settlements in 1978—a post which she held until the EDSA Revolution of February 1986,
Batasang Pambansa
In 1978, Kilusang Bagong Lipunan party fielded Imelda as a candidate in the Philippine parliamentary elections of 1978. Because most of the opposition candidates were either in jail or had limited mobility as a result of Martial Law, Imelda Marcos easily won a seat as a member of the Interim Batasang Pambansa (National Congress) representing Region IV (Metro Manila). This was arranged after a secret hospital visit by Imelda. Aquino supposedly agreed to her conditions that he return to the Philippines and not speak out against the Marcos regime in the US. Having made a quick recovery, Aquino decided to remain in the US, saying that "a pact with the devil is no pact at all".
Six months after martial law was lifted on January 17, 1981, Ferdinand Marcos was re-elected as president. While her husband began to suffer from lupus erythematosus, Imelda effectively ruled in his place.
Imelda claimed that during her last meeting with Aquino on May 21, 1983, in New York, she "begged him for 3½ hours to postpone his return to the Philippines until it was safe for him to come". Aquino returned to the Philippines on August 21, 1983, and was assassinated at Manila International Airport upon his arrival. Feeling that he was pressured into causing an investigation of the assassination, Ferdinand created the Agrava Commission, a fact-finding committee, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Aquino Jr., ultimately finding the military guilty.
Exile in Hawaii (1986–1991)
At midnight, February 26, 1986, the Marcos family fled the country to Hawaii Their arrival was controversial, and soon led to Hawaii residents calling on the government to force the Marcoses to leave.
The US Government initially hosted the exiles at Hickam Air Force Base. His son Bongbong was the only family member present at his deathbed.
After Imelda left Malacañang Palace, press reports worldwide took note of her lavish wardrobe, said to include 15 mink coats, 508 gowns, 888 handbags, and 3,000 pairs of shoes. Some news reports estimated that there were up to 7,500 pairs, but Time magazine reported that the final tally was 1,060.
Return from exile (1991–present)
thumb|220px|Official portrait of Marcos during the [[16th Congress of the Philippines|16th Congress]]
On November 4, 1991, President Corazon Aquino allowed Imelda and her children to return to the Philippines so they could be formally charged in their tax fraud and corruption cases – part of the government's effort to convince Swiss courts to return the money in the Marcos's Swiss Bank accounts to the Philippine government.
After her return from exile, Imelda returned to politics.
In 1992, Imelda ran for president in the 1992 Philippine presidential election, finishing 5th out of 7 candidates.
She was elected as a congresswoman of Leyte during the 1995 Philippine general election, representing the first district, despite facing a disqualification lawsuit in which the Supreme Court ruled in her favor.
She chose not to seek re-election in Congress and instead sought the presidency again in the 1998 Philippine presidential election, but later withdrew to support the eventual winner Joseph Estrada, while she finished 9th among 11 candidates.
thumb|left|Imelda Marcos (6th from left) and her family during the [[Inauguration of Bongbong Marcos|inauguration of her son Bongbong in 2022]]
In November 2006, Marcos started her own business, a fashion label "Imelda Collection" including jewelry, clothing and shoes with the help of her daughter Imee.
Imelda ran for the second district of Ilocos Norte in the 2010 Philippine House of Representatives elections to replace her son, Ferdinand Jr. (Bongbong), who ran for senator under the Nacionalista Party. During her term, she held the position of Millennium Development Goals committee chair in the Lower House.
She was re-elected on May 14, 2013, and on May 9, 2016, for a third and final term.
In October 2018, Marcos filed her certificate of candidacy to run for governor of Ilocos Norte in the 2019 Philippine general election to replace her daughter, Imee, who was term-limited and chose to run for senator. However, following her conviction of graft, she withdrew from the race a month later and was substituted by her grandson Matthew Manotoc, initially her running mate for vice governor. Manotoc eventually won the gubernatorial race.
Marcos underwent a successful angioplasty at St. Luke's Medical Center – Global City, Taguig on May 7, 2023. She was hospitalized in March 2024 after contracting a suspected case of pneumonia.
Major court cases
Imelda Marcos has been involved in court cases against her in the Philippines and abroad. Some of these, such as her corruption charges in the Philippines, are criminal cases. Others, such as the rulings of the Swiss Federal Court on her bank accounts, are either civil or forfeiture cases. together with eight associates (including Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian businessman and weapons smuggler believed to have been involved with her husband's regime), were indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan on charges of racketeering, conspiracy, fraud and obstruction of justice. She pleaded not guilty to federal charges that she used $103 million in stolen government funds to buy Manhattan real estate and art. The Marcos couple's defense team was led by criminal defense attorney Gerry Spence. Actor George Hamilton, an unindicted co-conspirator, testified at trial under a grant of immunity, acknowledging that he had received a $5.5-million loan from Marcos's associate. In July 1990, following a three-month trial, she was acquitted of all charges,
1995 human rights violations class suit (Hawaii)
In February 1995, the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii ruled against the Marcoses, awarding $1.96 billion to 9,539 victims of human rights violations during the Marcos dictatorship. This decision was upheld by US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996. The ruling has yet to be enforced in the Philippines due to jurisdiction issues.
In 1993, Marcos was convicted on a graft case. This was overturned by the Appellate Court in 2008, and the reversal was upheld by the Philippine Supreme Court in 2018
In March 2008, a judge in Manila acquitted her of 32 counts of illegal transfers of funds to Swiss bank accounts between 1968 and 1976, determining that the government had failed to prove its case.
In 2011, the Sandiganbayan Fifth Division ordered her to return in government funds taken by her and her husband from the National Food Authority. On November 9, 2018, the Sandiganbayan convicted Marcos on seven counts of graft and corruption, which disqualified Marcos from holding any public office.
2018 Swiss foundation cases convictions
In 1991, Marcos was indicted on ten corruption charges in the Philippines' anti-graft court, the Sandiganbayan.
Twenty-seven years later, on November 9, 2018, she was convicted on seven counts of violating the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, for funneling roughly to various Swiss foundations while she was still serving as governor of Metro Manila in the 1970s. That same day, the court announced her acquittal on the three remaining counts,
She was sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to eleven years for each count – totalling a minimum of 42 years and 7 months, and a maximum of 77 years. The Sandiganbayan also disqualified Marcos, a representative for the first district of Ilocos Norte and a candidate for governor of the same province, from holding any public office.
On November 12, 2018, Marcos's attorney filed a "Motion for Leave of Court to Avail of Post-Conviction Remedies", which included a provision for bail. The court granted bail due to her "ill health", but reserved ruling on the balance of the requests until November 28. Marcos posted bail on November 16, 2018, a week after her conviction. She intends to appeal her conviction. then granted on November 28. The Supreme Court's interpretation of R.A. 1379 says that property acquired by a public officer or employee which is "manifestly out of proportion to his salary as such public officer and to his other lawful income" is "presumed prima facie to have been unlawfully acquired".
Estimates of this ill-gotten wealth vary, with sources estimating a figure of about to for wealth acquired in the last years of the Marcos administration. but states that it is likely that she and her husband stole billions of pesos while in power, and that the amount they stole could have paid off the entirety of the Philippine foreign debt.
In a 1985 report to the United States Congress House Committee on Foreign Affairs, US Ambassador to the Philippines Stephen Bosworth estimated that the Marcoses had stolen an accumulated wealth of "in recent years", in the context of the rapid decline of the Philippine economy in the early 1980s. The same figure was cited by the Philippines' Office of the Solicitor General soon after Marcos was deposed by the EDSA Revolution in 1986. Bosworth's source, Dr. Bernardo Villegas of the Philippine think tank the Center for Research and Communication (CRC), noted that the figure ultimately cited by Bosworth was a conservative estimate, and that the amount probably came closer to $13 billion.
The PCGG's first chairperson, Jovito Salonga, later said that he estimated the figure to be to ,
Aside from the Marcoses' amassed wealth, Imelda Marcos was famous for spending it, with some accounts calling her "the ultimate personification of conspicuous consumption". On one occasion, Imelda spent $2,000 on chewing gum at the San Francisco International Airport and, on another, forced a plane to do a U-turn mid-air because she had forgotten to buy cheese in Rome. is now kept in the National Museum of the Philippines, while another is displayed in a shoe museum in Marikina. Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) damaged her ancestral home in Tacloban, which also serves as a museum, although she still retains homes in Ilocos Norte and Makati, where she resides.
Sequestration
Some of this wealth has been recovered as the result of various court cases – and has either been returned to the Philippine government, or awarded as reparations to the victims of human rights abuses under Marcos's presidency. Some of it has also been recovered by the Philippine government through settlements and compromise deals, either with Imelda or cronies who say that certain properties had been entrusted to them by the Marcoses. An amount of unidentified proportions—Marcos using the alias "William Saunders" and Imelda using the alias "Jane Ryan". These were later moved into other accounts under various dummy foundations, but when relevant records were discovered by the new Philippine government after the 1986 EDSA revolution, the Swiss Federal council froze them. On December 21, 1990, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ruled that these accounts could be turned over to the Philippine government, on the condition that there be a concurring "final and absolute judgment" by a Philippine court. In 1997, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court established the funds to have been "of criminal provenance" and permitted their transfer to an escrow account in Manila, pending a ruling from a Philippine court Switzerland finally released a total of $683 million in Marcos funds to the Philippines Treasury in 2004.
Throughout the 1980s, Imelda Marcos bought four prominent buildings in Manhattan. These were the Crown Building at the corner of 57th and Fifth; 40 Wall Street, later renamed the Trump building; the Herald Center; and the building at 200 Madison Avenue. She declined to buy the Empire State Building because she felt it was "too ostentatious".
On January 13, 2014, three collections of Imelda Marcos's jewelry: the Malacanang collection, the Roumeliotes collection, and the Hawaii collection; along with paintings by Claude Monet were seized by the Philippine government. In 2015, a rare pink diamond worth $5 million was discovered in her jewelry collection. The value of the three collections was appraised to be at about $21 million on February 16, 2016, when the government of the Philippines announced their intention to auction them off. They had not been sold as of April 17, 2020.
Her property also used to include a 175-piece art collection, which included works by Michelangelo, Botticelli, Canaletto, Raphael, as well as Monet's L'Église et La Seine à Vétheuil (1881), Alfred Sisley's Langland Bay (1887), and Albert Marquet's Le Cyprès de Djenan Sidi Said (1946). On October 17, 2013, the attempted sale of two Claude Monet paintings, Bautista was sentenced in 2014 to 2–6 years in prison for attempting to sell "valuable masterpieces that belonged to her country".
All told, about P170 billion worth of the Marcos wealth had been recovered by the PCGG by 2018 from the Marcoses – about $3.6 billion out of their $5–10 billion estimated ill-gotten wealth. She has claimed without evidence that her fortune came from Ferdinand Marcos's discovery of Yamashita's gold, a semi-mythical treasure trove that is widely believed in the Philippines to be part of the Japanese loot in World War II.
But Marcos has also said in interviews that "If you know how rich you are, you are not rich. But me, I am not aware of the extent of my wealth. That's how rich we are."
World record for largest theft from a government
The amount the Marcoses were estimated to have plundered from the Philippines is so large that it has been the subject of world records. Imelda Marcos, together with her husband Ferdinand (who is considered by many to be one of the greatest plunderers in history according to the Washington Post), were jointly credited in 1989 by Guinness World Records with the largest-ever theft from a government: an estimated 5 billion to 10 billion dollars salted away. In 2009, Imelda Marcos was listed by Newsweek as being one of the "greediest people of all time". To this, Marcos replied: "I plead guilty. For me, greedy is giving. I was first lady for 20 years, you have to be greedy first to give to all. It is natural. The only things we keep in life are those we give away."
Edifice complex
The term "edifice complex" has been applied to Imelda and her penchant for grandiose public buildings, often constructed in impossibly short order. It was designed by architect Leandro Locsin and was built on a reclaimed land along Roxas Boulevard in Manila and covered an area of about . Ninety thousand pesos was granted by the Philippine-American Culture Foundation for its construction Although it wasn't initiated by Imelda herself, it was promoted by the administration as Ferdinand Marcos's gift to his wife. It was funded with foreign loans of (about ), from Japan's Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency (OTCA), the predecessor of today's Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Upon its completion on July 2, 1973, Imelda's birthday, economists and public works engineers quickly tagged it as a white elephant which was "constructed several decades too soon," had turned her into a household name, frequently compared to Marie Antoinette of France, except "with shoes". to describe
It also refers to people who have "the Imelda Marcos syndrome" – tending to be extravagant and not being afraid to flaunt it, or to describe a lifestyle of "ostentatious extravagance".
It has also come to be used in International English, with dictionary writer and Atlantic columnist Anne Soukhanov expounding on the "ostentatious extravagance" etymology. In popular international media, the Sydney Morning Heralds Jackie Dent said it simply "means to be ... well, like Imelda". when he said: