The white three-piece suit John Travolta wore strutting down a Brooklyn sidewalk in Saturday Night Fever (1977) heads to auction on 26 August, carrying an estimate of US$200,000 to US$400,000.

Propstore, a London- and Los Angeles-based memorabilia specialist, is offering the suit as part of an "Entertainment Memorabilia" sale of roughly 1,700 lots spanning film, television, music and sports. The live event takes place at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, presenting over 400 lots, followed by three days of online, phone and absentee bidding (Artnet News).

The suit's provenance — the documented chain of ownership — reads like a short story. Film critic Gene Siskel originally bought it for about US$2,000 at auction, outbidding Jane Fonda to get it. He later sold it through Christie's in 1995 for US$145,000. Inside the jacket, a handwritten note from Travolta to Siskel reads: "here's to a classic" (Artnet News).

The Travolta suit is far from the priciest item on offer. That distinction belongs to a 15-inch stop-motion puppet of Mighty Joe Young from the 1949 film of the same name, estimated at US$1,000,000 to US$2,000,000. Stop-motion animation moves a physical puppet frame by frame to create the illusion of movement, and this figure is the primary armature used in the original production (Artnet News).

Among the other standout lots: a wooden special-effects hoverboard used by Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future Part II (1989), estimated at US$150,000 to US$300,000, and one of only twelve Wilson volleyball props made for Cast Away (2000), Tom Hanks's desert-island companion, also carrying a US$150,000 to US$300,000 estimate (Artnet News).

For fans and collectors, the sale is a chance to own a tangible piece of a film they first encountered on a screen. For the market, it is another data point in a memorabilia sector that has grown steadily since the 1990s, when Siskel picked up his suit for the price of a decent holiday.