First published by T Magazine on 17 September 2015
Zandra Rhodes is dressed casually for our interview — but “casual is always with jewelry and makeup,” she says. “Always.” Her makeup consists of a thick circle of blue eye shadow paired with a dark red lipstick — the same every day, because she has no time for trial and error. She wears it all night, removes it each morning and applies a new layer in its place: “I only look at myself once a day,” she says.
The British designer is now 74 years old and “busier than busy,” as she is in the midst of preparing for her first London Fashion Week presentation since 2007, which will be held tomorrow at the Hotel Café Royal. Every time she shows at fashion week, Rhodes goes through nerve-racking waves of excitement and anxiety. “I always remember reading Saint Laurent saying, ‘To do a collection twice a year is like having a baby.’ Like him, I haven’t had a baby, but I think it’s probably worse,” she says, and falls apart laughing. “I always find it very stressful to do a collection, because you put your whole spirit into it. On the other hand, as it comes alive, it also becomes exciting. So on one side of me, it’s terrifying, and on the other it’s rather wonderful that everyone’s taking so much notice.”
Even for the most in-the-know of London’s fashion followers, who make pilgrimages each season to the newest labels, it would be hard not to feel beguiled by Rhodes. She has been one of the city’s most charming and idiosyncratic designers since she began working in the mid-1960s. Some of the biggest names of the late 20th century wore her designs: Debbie Harry, Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury, Diana Ross. In the 1970s she was labeled the “Princess of Punk,” for using torn jersey and safety pins in her collections — long before those details became familiar tropes of the style. Of course, the world has changed around her since then. Fashion is a “merry-go-round,” she says, and it has taken her from anarchist to part of the British establishment: She was made a Dame at Buckingham Palace last February.
In person, Rhodes exudes a youthful, Pollyanna-ish cheer. Her fingernails are haphazardly painted in a metallic teal, and she still has her trademark fuchsia bob: “I can’t really imagine changing it,” she says. “For me personally, my hair gives me my confidence, I suppose.” Years ago, she temporarily went back to brunette — but couldn’t bear the feedback. “People would come up at parties and say, ‘Excuse me, what do you do?’ and then they’d say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I should have recognized you!’ It was so awful that I thought, ‘I’m going to stay [pink] forever — it’s easier than going through that.’”
In her work, Rhodes is still experimenting. She has an unquenchable curiosity and a reluctance to say no — her projects over the years have encompassed opera costumes, umbrellas, greetings cards and a 2006 MAC makeup line, among many others. “I would say, unfortunately, that I’m a workaholic,” she concedes.
What she is showing at London Fashion Week is also a collaboration of sorts: “It’s really a collection for Malaysia,” she explains. Rhodes has a fond connection with the country, where she had a successful retrospective at the National Textile Museum in 2013 and showed at Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week in 2014. Now she has been invited to work with Malaysia’s native fabrics, so she has designed batiks and songket — traditional, intricate weaves. “There are wonderful, slightly heavy silks that have been hand-drawn,” she says. “To expand the collection, we’ve also done Zandra Rhodes prints, so it’s very colorful and printed. But additionally, we’ve worked on the jacquard weaves together with organzas and chiffons to make suits and dresses, and they look gorgeous.”
Rhodes’s studio occupies the bottom half of a four-story building in Bermondsey, south London, and she lives in the two floors above. She refers to the top floor as her penthouse, conjuring up images of beige-and-glass hotel suites; in reality, it is a joyous, chaotic playroom — a million miles from the monotony of accepted good taste. The floor and walls are painted in a rainbow of broad stripes, and there is so much to look at that a visitor’s eyes cannot stay still. A pair of glittering swans — one pink, one blue — pose in the window, near an enormous chandelier that dangles tiny letter Zs. An African statue carries silk flowers and green fronds, and racks of clothes in Rhodes’s famous prints are lined up against one wall. There are bright sculptures and tchotchkes everywhere, and near the door is her Emmy Award, which she won for designing costumes for “Romeo and Juliet on Ice” in 1979, and on which she now hangs her keys.
A huge dining table is the focus of her beloved social life. “I love cooking, so I will invite about 16 friends on a weekend to come to dinner — usually very casual English things, like bread and butter pudding, and I’ll do a whole salmon,” she says. In the center of the table is a large china pot overflowing with fake daffodils, and around it is an arrangement of stones and fossils from everywhere Rhodes has been, including opal from Australia and a chunk of the Berlin Wall.
Rhodes is a self-confessed hoarder, and every item in the room seems to bring her delight. A Russian friend once gave her a white money box shaped like a bust of Vladimir Putin — so she painted Putin gold and added a polka-dot necktie. He now stands guard at the entrance to her terrace, which is flanked by two candy-striped pillars. Outside, the sun-baked roof is covered in plants: Succulents and cacti are sprouting strategically placed glass flowers; palm trees stoop overhead; and large pots of white hydrangeas bloom against the orange stucco walls. “Even if it’s raining, you’ve got something happening outside that’s inspirational,” she says.
Her inspirations first manifest themselves in endless sketches that fill stacks of books that she keeps for reference. When it’s time to put together a collection, this is where she begins. “Whether I drew wiggly lines, whether I drew pieces of grass, whether I looked at buildings when I was in Kuala Lumpur, or out in my garden looking at the flowers ... You draw on all the different things, put them together, and then it’s sort of like you sit there and get the whole thing to come forward,” she explains.
When she’s not at one studio in Bermondsey, Rhodes is at her second studio and home in California, where she lives with her partner Salah Hassanein, who is in his nineties. T asks her if she plans to retire at any point. “I think that if you love your work, why give it up?” she says. “I do live and die by it. I haven’t got any children, so my work and my interns and the people that work with me become my children.” Her vision of retirement is one of terrible boredom. “If I retired, and then I had nothing to do, I’d go round and I’d visit people, and they’d all be busy, and they wouldn’t have enough time to see me. I think it’s best to go on doing my work.” She roars with laughter again.