Peter Simon, the founder of Monsoon and Accessorize, is selling a significant portion of his personal art collection at Christie’s in London, in three sales in October that could fetch up to £126.7m.

Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection comprises nearly 200 pieces and includes works by Francis Bacon, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Hurvin Anderson. The collection is estimated to be worth between £86.5m and £126.7m.

It will be the highest-value collection from a single owner offered at Christie’s in London. The auction house said the collection “stands as one of Britain’s foremost modern and contemporary art collections”.

The sale includes two paintings from distinct stages of Bacon’s career. Figure in Movement, from 1978, is expected to sell for between £14m and £18m.

Study for a Figure, which is estimated to have been painted around 1945, is expected to sell for between £4m and £6m.

The collection will be presented in a special exhibition taking over the galleries at Christie’s London from 26 September until 1 October.

The auction will take place online from 1 to 20 October, with the evening sale on 14 October and the day sale on 15 October.

Simon said his early work at Monsoon, choosing prints for its clothing, had helped him to judge colour and composition in paintings.

“In the early days at Monsoon I would sit with fashion and textile designers sifting portfolio after portfolio to select works on paper which we would convert on to fabric for clothing collections,” he said.

“A critical part of the DNA of Monsoon is the colours and the prints. In retrospect, I realise this work happily honed an ability to recognise good composition with colour balance, having developed an eye for a good print, I find it helpful to zero in on the best combination of colour and composition in a picture.”

Simon added that it would give him “great pleasure to now offer part of my collection to others, freeing my mind and my walls to start in a new direction”.

Simon founded his clothing business by selling woollen coats from a market stall in Portobello Road in west London in the 1970s.

Monsoon Accessorize floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1998. Simon took the company private in a £755m deal in 2007.

Outside fashion, Simon has also invested in British homeware brand Loaf, which was founded by Charlie Marshall.

Christie’s is owned by Artémis, the holding company of François Pinault, the French billionaire behind luxury group Kering.

In 2022, the auction house’s sale of the collection of Paul Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, fetched $1.5bn in New York, becoming the biggest art auction ever held. That collection comprised more than 150 works.

In December 2025, Christie’s said it expected global sales to rise by about 6 per cent to $6.2bn that year, as both it and Sotheby’s reported a recovery in the global art market. Bonnie Brennan, its chief executive, said at the time that “the energy has returned to the salesroom, online and across the market”.

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