Now that celebrities start writing their life stories shortly after their teenage years, it seems remiss of Zandra Rhodes to have waited until she was 83 to pen hers — not least because her life so hugely warrants it. During her 55-year career the fuchsia-haired (the colour is “Pinkissimo”) fashion designer has dressed pop stars (Diana Ross, Freddie Mercury, Barbra Streisand) and princesses (Margaret, Anne and Diana), as well as the screen legends Elizabeth Taylor, Anjelica Huston and Lauren Bacall. At a time when the word “iconic” has become debased by its own ubiquity, Rhodes is that rare designer who truly deserves the descriptor; a woman whose personal appearance is as flamboyant as her textiles and her life. That is why her fifth book, Iconic: My Life in Fashion in 50 Objects, is so well named. “It’s a funny feeling,” is how she describes having written and illustrated her own memoir. “The ‘iconic’ bit makes you think, ‘Am I really that old?’”
Difficult as it was to narrow down the entries to a mere 50, the result is a colourful tome that not only tells her own life story but also paints a vivid and compelling picture of the broader fashion landscape between 1960 and the present day. Anecdotes? The book is full of them. Few people can boast of being friends with Karl Lagerfeld, Andy Warhol and David Hockney: fewer still have the good fortune to be alive to tell the tale.
Rhodes’s south London penthouse flat is as eccentric, eclectic and pink as its ebullient owner — a treasure trove of objets she has collected over the years. There are paintings by Duggie Fields, furniture by the architect Piers Gough, hats by Piers Atkinson (who also runs the Zandra Rhodes Foundation, the charity she set up in 2020) and a fan that once belonged to Lagerfeld. Mannequins dressed in vintage Rhodes add a further colour pop. It’s like Studio 54 by way of Bermondsey, so it’s not at all surprising that Rhodes was a regular at the renowned New York club.
“I always thought he looked like a human mushroom,” she says of Warhol, a Studio 54 regular, adding that they were never close. She is close to Hockney, though, but “I don’t like the work done on that iPad thing. He’s a master of pencil drawing and he wastes his time on that silly iPad. I think it’s dreadful.”
Born in Kent in 1940, Rhodes studied printed textiles at the Royal College of Art in London (where she struck up her friendship with Hockney), setting up her own label in 1969. Frustrated by being pigeonholed as a textile designer in the UK, she went to America, where, in the 1970s, her British eclecticism quickly earned her fame as a dress designer.
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“I was lucky because I was on the crest of a wave,” she says, smiling. “You had the spirit of the Beatles rising into the hippy period. We hadn’t [yet] gone into street culture. I managed to capture the heart of the chic American clientele.” She certainly did, Jacqueline Onassis and Babe Paley among them.
But if chic Americans cemented her career, a chic English woman propelled it into the stratosphere. In 1981 two twentysomething women walked into Rhodes’s London boutique and changed her life for ever. Lady Diana Spencer and her friend Sarah Ferguson arrived without entourage, browsing the rails and giggling like any other clients, barring the fact that one of them had recently got engaged to a prince and would be married later that year in a ceremony that was to become one of the biggest events in royal history.
As Rhodes observes in her book, she and Diana made unlikely clothes-fellows. “My designs, for all their feminine romance, were still bold, unique and attention-grabbing. I had bright pink hair and could hardly be considered the typically genteel sort of designer normally found working with princesses.”
In fact Rhodes’s nonconformist streak found its twin in Diana. Her impromptu store visit led to a call from British Vogue, asking Rhodes to submit a design for the royal wedding dress. Her sketch, a black satin corset with gold pleated sleeves and a full skirt with boned panniers and pleated swirls (“There’s no point dialling down who you are for the purposes of others,” she notes drily in her book) didn’t find its destiny in St Paul’s Cathedral, though it did have the distinction of eventually being worn by another Diana — Diana Ross — which was no small consolation prize.
She was disappointed that her design wasn’t chosen for the royal nuptials, but the relationship between the two was far from over. In 1986 the princess visited Rhodes’s shop again, this time with a security guard, since the paparazzi now followed her every move. After trying on a black off-the-shoulder dress, she asked Rhodes to remake it in pink. Shortly afterwards she embarked on a royal tour of Japan and wore the dress to a state dinner. The photograph made the front pages of several newspapers.
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Rhodes says that in person Diana was “very, very shy”, her hunched shoulders and bitten fingernails suggestive of the pressures she was under. “‘Happy’ wasn’t a word I would have associated with her, but she was very warm. You get let into the palace with this dress over your arm and you do a curtsy and you bump into the children’s toys,” she says, smiling. In the book she recalls commenting on one particularly unsettling toy with fangs. “Oh, that’s William’s favourite doll,” Diana replied.
Rhodes never met the young princes, but she did go on to dress Diana a further four times before her death in 1997, becoming so close to the princess that she was invited to her funeral. “Like so many others, I cried a lot that day,” she recalls in the book.
“Diana got a raw deal. You can have all the riches in the world, but if you don’t have love, or don’t feel loved, you have very little.”
Rhodes met the love of her own life, the businessman Salah Hassanein, when she was 54: they were together for 25 years until his death in 2019. Since then she has been careful to nurture her platonic friendships. “Friends are quite amazing in that they can guide you and lead you on to other adventures that you’d never have realised,” she says. That includes the purchase of a large warehouse in Bermondsey, the top floor of which is now her home. She bought it in 1995 (“It took me five years to work out how to raise the money to convert it”) after a friend noticed it was up for sale. “He knew I’d saved 6,000 of my designs in trunks and that I’d always wanted to do a museum. I said, ‘Do you think I’m made of money?’ But they hadn’t built the Shard then. This was a very unchic area, boarded up from the bombs in the war, so I was able to sell my house in Notting Hill and buy the building.”
She opened the Fashion and Textile Museum in 2003, during a career slump (“I was in a ‘nobody’ period”), somehow persuading the renowned Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta to design it. Would she say she’s a persuasive person? “When I try,” she says with a grin.
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Persuasive, and also outspoken. Asked who the true fashion greats are, she says: “Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons. I don’t believe that Vivienne [Westwood] is as extraordinary as they like to say. I think she caught on to things, and to street fashion, but I don’t see that she has the originality of Miyake or Comme.”
Rhodes doesn’t think she has faced any extra challenges as a female designer. “Because I’m a boring, hard-working person, I don’t think I noticed. I just did the work. I’ve never felt that I was being passed by because of men, ever. There’s no point having a chip on your shoulder because that will work against you. I had a strong mother who said, ‘Go forward and do what you want to do.’ And I’ve been lucky enough that I can’t really say the world has gone against me.”
Who does she think should get the Chanel artistic director job? “Well, we were wondering if Pierpaolo [Piccioli] might get it,” she says, adding that the former creative director of Valentino enlisted her to do textiles for his first solo show for the house, in 2017.
She feels sad that the young British designers of today don’t have the same global opportunities that she did. “Where do the poor things go? The problem I see in this country is that what happens to our designers can only be small-time, unless they go and work for a larger European or American company because we don’t have the market. We don’t have the facilities for the same sort of export. Everything’s working against design in this country. In the past we were always at the forefront for design.”
She laments the homogenisation of design houses. “Some of the lines at the moment, it frightens me that they’re existing on sneakers and T-shirts. They’ve lost their true identity — through commercial greed, probably. They’re not definable in the same way. It’s almost as though none of them wants to stand out.”
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It’s not a problem she has ever had. Diagnosed with cancer in 2020 (doctors told her she had six months to live), she’s now even more determined to live life her own way. “I find colour makes you feel good,” is how she explains her love of it. “I don’t think you should tone it down when you get older. It’s much better to be bright and cheerful and face the world.”
Obviously she loved the Barbie movie. “There was a lot of intelligence and depth to it. It should’ve got more awards than that other film with all the bombs.”
I wonder whether, at 83, she has discovered the secret to a happy life. “To keep working,” she says immediately. “I can’t think of anything worse than not having any work. For most of my friends their work is the most important thing.” Exercise, meanwhile, is a necessary evil. “I begrudgingly do an hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays, by computer. He’ll make me do bends and stretches, and I hate it.”
As for how Rhodes would like to be remembered: “I’d like to go down in history as being a very original textile and fashion designer, who developed textile print to be part of the garment, and who had something original to say.” There’s no danger of her being remembered as anything less than an original.
Iconic by Zandra Rhodes and Ella Alexander (Transworld £25). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Image credits: Getty Images, © David Levene/The Guardian/Eyevine, Alamy, Shutterstock
