Whitney Houston's intricate wedding dress up for auction

Los Angeles: Whitney Houston's numerous awards, stunning red-carpet dresses and other personal affects will be up for an auction.

Organised by auction house Heritage Auctions and sanctioned by her estate, it will take place later this month, reported Billboard magazine.

"The (Houston) family actually reached out to the president of our company," said Garry Shrum, director of Entertainment and Music Memorabilia at Heritage Auctions.

"We had worked with a good friend of theirs, David Gest. He knew us and liked what we did and told the Houston (family) about us, and my colleague Margaret Barrett and I went out to New Jersey and listened to what they wanted to do.

"We gave them some ideas, they gave us some ideas, and we came up with this 119-piece collection that'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. We have her passport from the beginning, all these various awards and outfits, all kinds of cool and groovy things."

The most buzzed-about item on the internet is her intricate, one-of-a-kind Marc Bouwer wedding dress, which she wore to wed Bobby Brown in 1992.

Some of the more unique and sentimental items include weathered passports, a jacket given to Whitney by her father emblazoned with her childhood nickname Nippy, and a Disney coloring book entirely in Japanese.