CROWN PRINTS
As Dame Zandra Rhodes’s label turns 50, the madcap British designer shows no sign of slowing down. Clare Press meets the unstoppable fashion force.
As her label turns 50, madcap designer Dame Zandra Rhodes shows no sign of slowing down.
“COME ON IN darling, we’re just doing fittings,” says Dame Zandra Rhodes, a vision in pink from head to toe, on the eve of her London Fashion Week show. Fuchsia hair and Crocs to match, her socks are pink, too. As is her boilersuit. She’s accessorised, as usual, with clanking costume jewellery by her best friend, Andrew Logan. Today’s pendant necklace features an enormous portrait of Rhodes in mirrored mosaic. She has painted her eyes with electric-blue triangles, Cleopatra style. Quite the get-up for a Sunday afternoon, but then she always looks like this – has done for half a century. She doesn’t do dressed down.
“Oh no, I wouldn’t like that,” she says of the prospect of a more casual look, leading me past a model being pinned into fan-pleated chiffon. Rhodes nods her approval. “We’ll go to the basement, it’s quieter down there.” We’re at her apartment at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, London, the gallery she opened in 2003. Specialising in fashion from the 50s onwards, the museum has held exhibitions on everything from trainers to knitwear, Swinging London, photography and designers including Anna Sui.
As you read this, the museum will be showing a retrospective of Rhodes’s own work. This year marks the British national treasure’s 50th at the helm of her eponymous label. There’s a book, too, Zandra Rhodes, 50 Fabulous Years in Fashion, published by Yale University Press in September, and what she’s dubbed “The Year of Z”, which kicked
off with a return to London Fashion Week for spring/summer ’19.
But don’t think this has put the designer in nostalgic mode. “I haven’t had time to do much reflection,” she says. “I just keep going forward.” She is happy, however, to talk about her Australian history, which dates back to 1971, when she visited for a collaboration she did with Sydney company Sekers Silks.
“It turned out to be this huge campaign, it was one of those freak things,” says Rhodes. “They phoned just before I left and said: ‘You’ve got green hair, would you change it?’ I said: ‘Oh. Yes?’ Then I put down the phone and thought: ‘No!’ It stayed green with feathers on the ends and I did all these appearances in Australian shops and on TV. I think I even did a Fashions on the Field. Since then, I’ve been coming back to Australia whenever I can.”
Nowadays, she stays in Melbourne with businessman Lindsay Fox (“my Australian family”). In 2004, she was a guest at Australian Fashion Week; four years later, RMIT held an exhibition of her textiles. But it was a trip in 1973 that has had the most lasting impact on her work. She visited Uluru, where she sketched and scrapbooked obsessively. The designs that came out of that journey, she says, remain her best.
“Pierpaolo [Piccioli] liked those,” she says. The Valentino creative director asked her to create prints for his spring/summer ‘17 collection, taking inspiration from the Hieronymus Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights (it was Piccioli’s first collection without long-term creative partner Maria Grazia Chiuri). It kicked off a new wave of Rhodes mania.
What was that like? “I thought it was a wonderful compliment. I’d never met him in my life,” she says. If Rhodes sounds marvellously unfazed by this attention from the top, it’s because she’s had plenty of it. At her debut show at London’s Roundhouse in 1972, Bianca Jagger, Michael Chow and Warhol superstar Donna Jordan were in the audience, while David Bailey and Penelope Tree threw the after-party.
Asked about running about with Ossie Clark, Twiggy and Jerry Hall and being part of London’s cataclysmic fashion moment in the early 70s, she says: “Looking back, I can see it, but at the time you just lived through it – doing the prints and walking around in transparent chiffon. It was a time of new things and possibility. You could open a shop with very little money and the musicians would ask you to make them something.” Rhodes dressed Marc Bolan and Freddie Mercury, having opened her first boutique in 1967, freshly minted from the Royal College of Art.
She describes the “aggressive youth movement” of London punk that came next as being “parallel but totally divorced from me”. Although Rhodes incorporated punk elements, like jagged scissor cuts and safety pins, in her 1974 collection of shocking-pink and pillar-box-red silks, her designs were always destined for Harrods.
Later, she dressed Princess Diana and did a range for Marks and Spencer. She turned up on Absolutely Fabulous. And a few months ago, she appeared on Britain’s Celebrity MasterChef. She’s gone from renegade art kid to part of the establishment, and somehow hasn’t changed a bit.
“It’s very tough for young designers today,” she says. “There’s a lot of noise and competition. The trick is to find your unique design voice and believe in it.” Her number-one piece of advice? “In fashion, you’ve got to stay true to yourself. Life is long and if you’re lucky, your career will be long. Some moments they might want you – look at what happened with me with Valentino – others they may not, and that’s okay. I’m still me.”
“I haven’t had time to do much reflection. I just keep going forward”