“You have to try. You have to take the bull by the horns and hope you are going in the right direction”
Zandra Rhodes has forged a reputation based on doing things her own way. She tells Frances Ambler about how it still remains a challenge even 50 years on
From being dubbed the “Princess of Punk” to designing for the Princess Royal, Zandra Rhodes’ work spans British culture – and five decades of design. But Zandra is not about to position herself as some kind of lifestyle guru. When asked to share some wisdom with our readers, her immediate response is, “Oh the poor things!” However, Zandra is exactly the kind of person you’d want to take advice from as she’s just as willing to be open about the struggles she’s faced as the triumphs. The way she’s sustained her career is a lesson in figuring out how you can do things your own way.
And she had to figure that out right from the very beginning. Zandra graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1965, having studied printed textiles. But after graduation, “I went to sell my work and I couldn’t sell. They said ‘It’s too extreme’.” Her move into fashion, therefore, came out of necessity – she began creating her own garments out of her prints, showing how they could be used. Zandra developed a unique approach that became her trademark – letting the print itself determine the way the item of clothing is designed, rather than the other way around. By the late 1960s, juggling designing with teaching to pay the bills, she made a leap of faith and took her designs to the US.
“When I look back, I don’t know how I was brave enough!” she laughs. “These two Ukrainian American models were telling me to come to America and make my fortune. I had one American friend. I didn’t know anyone else. He said, ‘I’m going over, why don’t you go over at the same time?’” Those models were right: her “three-week holiday-cum-business trip” paid off and by 1970 her designs were in the pages of American
Vogue. Did courage, luck or talent play the biggest part? “I’d use the word ‘serendipity’,” Zandra says.
LIVING IN COLOUR
Picture Zandra and, very likely, it’s her distinctive pink hair that springs to mind. It was around the time that she went to the States that, realising that people didn’t always ‘get’ her designs, Zandra began using herself as her own model. She experimented with make-up and hair-dye to show how her clothes could be worn – sometimes even using false-eyelash glue to stick feathers into her hair. Such playfulness has become harder as she gets older, she admits, but she remains an advocate for people having fun with the way they look. Her love of colour extends to architecture, too. The Fashion and Textile Museum she founded in 2003 is a blast of orange and pink on London’s streets. It aims to celebrate all “the British designers who had been badly overlooked,” and is one of her proudest achievements.
Truth be told, it’s possible that we’re also guilty of
– if not overlooking – taking Zandra’s achievements for granted. The current exhibition Zandra Rhodes 50
Years of Fabulous at the Fashion and Textile Museum is a good reminder of why we shouldn’t: a kaleidoscope of colour and intricate patterns, drawing on influences
spanning everything from Native American clothing to postcards of Ayers Rock. She’s dressed everyone from Princess Diana – in “the lovely pink dress” she wore for her pregnancy announcement – to Freddie Mercury. Cocktail dresses and cloaks are shown alongside costumes for operas – each unique but recognisably Zandra. It makes it seem easy but, of course, it hasn’t been. Her guiding principle is that “as a designer, it is your work that you can stand and fall by. I have stuck to my beliefs and been true to myself and my art.”
A LIFE’S WORK
Zandra’s work ethic is rooted in her upbringing. Born in Chatham in Kent, her mother worked for a high-end fashion house, and her father was a lorry driver.
Zandra describes how her parents “were always working. And when I say working my father would come back in the evening and be mending his bicycle. Or weaving a stair carpet. My mother would be sewing dresses. On holiday, my mother would knit both my sister and me a sweater!” Zandra, too, was “always drawing, painting and doing things. Very early on, I’d make doll’s dresses but I didn’t think I was going into sewing.” Her mother’s favourite motto remains Zandra’s, too: “Good, better, best, never let it rest, till your good is better and your better best”.
At the moment, work-wise, things are definitely at the ‘best’ end of the spectrum. She describes herself as »
“The longer you do it, the more you worry that you don’t have a clue what you’re doing”
being “at this wonderful peak, everything is so fabulous”. But she’s juggling the looking back required by a retrospective with trying to move forward and find space for herself. “At the moment it’s far too much. I would like to be able to work out how to take a step back and not be under such pressure.”
That’s been put into focus by the death of her partner, Salah Hassanein, last year. They were together for over 25 years, splitting their time between London and the US. As President of Warner Brothers, his appetite for work matched her own. “I was lucky that he liked me doing my work. Because he was always working, he didn’t notice that I was always working, and that I was completely boring!” Now, dealing with his death, Zandra feels “very lucky that I have my work.
If I didn’t have my work, I’d be buried under.”
THE FRIENDSHIP FACTOR
Friends have always been very important to Zandra, both creatively and emotionally. “I don’t need lots of glory,” she says, “it’s the friendships.” Her close friends – she names the jeweller and sculptor Andrew Logan, founder of the Alternative Miss World, and postmodern digital pioneer Duggie Fields – are “artists in their own right”. She’s made “great friends” of people whose work she admires, the likes of ceramicists Kate Malone and Carol McNicoll. “I’ve collected their work since they were at the Royal College of Art. You choose or drift towards friends who are like-minded.” Not too like-minded, however: “I suppose you could say that they’re not competing with what I do but they’ve got the same kind of work ethic and we all admire each other’s work. I suppose if they were friends that were in fashion, it could be a bit more difficult!” Often by looking at work, or discussing it, her friends are a catalyst for new ideas. When she has the opportunity, she’s loved travelling to places such as Morocco or India on sketching trips, often with Andrew. Zandra describes their day: “We draw, look at things and go to museums. Basically we’re looking for inspiration.” Maintaining the discipline of making at
least one drawing a day, Zandra frequently revisits her sketchbooks when she’s looking for a creative spark.
IN IT FOR THE LONG RUN
If you’ve ever felt insecure about your work, take comfort in the fact that so does one Dame Zandra Rhodes, one of the world’s most successful designers. “The longer you do it, the more you worry that you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. There’s no such thing as security in this job. You have to just pray that you can grasp onto an idea that’s possibly going on and you might be able to pick up on it and know what to do.” Zandra talks about this pretty heavy subject matter with the lightest of touches. “You ask yourself, ‘Am I going out on a limb?’” she chuckles. “You have to try. You just have to take the bull by the horns and hope that you’re going in the right direction.”
That means that, rather than engage with fashion’s endless merry-go-round, Zandra is designing for longevity. “I hope that they’re designs that people then treasure and want to keep, not that they’ll have them and then throw them away. I always feel very complimented when someone says, ‘I bought this dress 20 years ago but I still wear it, I want to treasure it.’ I don’t think we should forever be filling up the market with buying new. Instead can we re-wear and make things look lovely and make them look different?” she argues. “What’s wrong with wearing something several times? What’s wrong with giving it a different look? I think that’s the wonderful experiment.”
Still driven by a desire to experiment and create, there’s a sense that – at 79 – Zandra is at a crossroads. She wants to make space to be able to continue doing what she loves. “It’s got to be positive. I’d like to find more space, I’d like to learn how to relax
– I don’t know any of those things but,” she adds, crucially, “I still want to go on designing and I still love doing what I’m doing.”
Zandra Rhodes 50 Years of Fabulous is at the Fashion and Textile Museum until 26 January 2020.