I meet her in her equally vivid Bermondsey penthouse. The walls are Yves Klein blue and egg-yolk yellow, the furniture is Indian. Her latest project is a limited-edition capsule make-up collection for Mac. She lifts an aquatic-hued fingernail and taps a small gold palette with squiggles on it. “The palette decor was based on my drawings,” she says. The collaboration was conceived a couple of years ago, around the time of her Zandra Rhodes: A Lifelong Love Affair exhibition. She approached Mac in the hope that it would sponsor her. That didn’t materialise, but a few months later, she was in San Diego (where her boyfriend lives) and Mac called her up to ask for a meeting in New York. “They said, ‘We’ve been thinking about it, and we’d like to do something special.’” The results are a palette with six eye-shadow colours (£29), three lipsticks (£11 each) and two lipglosses (£10.50 each).
It took a year and a half to get the colours right. But the results are true to what Rhodes herself wears, and they have the customary Mac richness of pigmentation. “You wouldn’t see me dead without some of these colours on,” she says with a smile. “I never go out without make-up, that’s my rule.”
Rhodes is her own canvas. Ever since her formative days at the Royal College in the late 1960s, she has been experimenting with her appearance. When she left college, she’d improvise using bright lipsticks as eye shadows. Then, inspired by some green “Isadora” wigs that Vidal Sassoon had brought out, she decided to change her hair. “I went in to Leonard and said I’d like my hair bleached and dyed green. They’d never done it before, and they had to really experiment to get the tone right. The first colours washed out.” Amazingly, this prefigured punk by at least five years. During the early 1970s, she used to stick brightly coloured feathers onto the ends of her hair with theatrical glue. Later, she tried blue hair, “but it goes like straw in the sun”. Before the advent of brands with a huge spectrum of colour, such as Mac and Shu Uemura, she’d borrow pigments from the make-up artists who did her shows (Yvonne Gold, Richard Sharah and Barbara Daly) to do her own face. Sometimes she’d have dots above her eyes, and sometimes her “Frida Kahlo look”, a single eyebrow. “I’ve never cared about what other people think — I once walked through Victoria station with three eyebrows.”
Ageing doesn’t frighten her, either. I notice how, at 66, under all that colour and pigment, she has the most wonderful pale, unwrinkled visage. She has said no to Botox and no to surgery. “I don’t think I’m a face-lift sort of person. I use colour instead. I suppose my secret is I don’t sit in the sun. I put on 45 block and put hats and shades over my face so I don’t burn.”
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So she’s got a great base for the colours and shapes she draws on her face. “I hide behind my hair and make-up,” she says. “When I haven’t got make-up on I feel like nobody. My eyes feel small, they shrink. I remember once I dyed my hair brown. I thought maybe I should be more conservative, but it just didn’t feel like me. I didn’t feel interesting enough.”
We check out a few shots of celebs wearing her clothes. “We never see anyone on these pictures wearing anything but brown make-up,” she says, shaking her head.
Finally, I wonder if she has any golden rules for wearing colour, this woman who exploits the pantheon of Pantone. “Don’t match your make-up to your clothes,” says Rhodes, but then adds, “I find that turquoise goes with most things.” So now you know.
Mac’s Rhodes collection is available exclusively at Harrods; 020 7730 1234.
Zandra Rhodes is showing at London Fashion Week, Sept 18-22, sponsored by Mac