LONDON — Some people believe in a third eye, others in a third eyebrow.
Zandra Rhodes is — or at least was — in the latter camp. The designer, a woman who throbs with color from her flouro pink hair down to her flower-painted sneakers, recalls a rebellious phase when she was painting her face with abandon.
She tells her story from an equally colorful space, the Rainbow Penthouse on top of the building she owns on Bermondsey Street. It houses her studio, private apartments, and the Fashion and Textile Museum, which she founded in 2003, and which has hosted blockbuster shows including “The Biba Story: 1964-1975,” “Andy Warhol: The Textiles,” and “Kaffe Fassett: The Power of Pattern.”
“Karl Lagerfeld was always a wonderful friend to me. I first met him when I was selling some designs in Paris, and we always met up and had some wonderful dinners together,” said Rhodes over a cup of tea on an overcast summer afternoon.
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“One of the dinners was in Versailles. It was when I first took on my punk look. I had my three eyebrows and my punk white top. We had dinner with Anna Piaggi — and her umbrella,” added Rhodes, referring to the late Italian fashion editor who always wore a small hat, often with a veil, and carried an umbrella or cane with a lavish handle.
Rhodes, who turns 84 in September, has been reaching deep into her memory over the past two years for her latest book, a memoir called “Iconic: My Life in Fashion in 50 Objects” (Bantam), written with Ella Alexander, a journalist and contributing editor at Harper’s Bazaar.
It begins with Rhodes’ confession that she’s a lifelong hoarder, and its 340-plus pages contain a cabinet of curiosities that trace her history and slices of 20th century pop culture.
Some of the pieces are in the room right now, including the half-moon-shaped fan that Lagerfeld illustrated for Rhodes; the bust that her close friend Andrew Logan, the sculptor and jewelry designer, made of her, which was later purchased by the National Portrait Gallery, and the Daytime Emmy Award for her “Romeo and Juliet on Ice” costumes, which now doubles as a “rather fabulous” key holder, according to the designer.
There is also the pleated cream satin wedding cape she created for Freddie Mercury; the flowing, bohemian dresses worn by Natalie Wood and Princess Diana, and the large table with the orange Lucite base that Rhodes and a friend made when they graduated from the Royal College of Art.
“We decided that we’d have to make our home look very modern, and so we made all the furniture ourselves. This was a light-up table,” she said, pointing to the corrugated Lucite base of the table where she’s resting her mug of tea.
The book is one of many projects that has forced Rhodes to ponder her life and legacy, which she hadn’t really been thinking about until a few years ago. During lockdown, she was diagnosed with cancer in her abdomen and given six months to live. In her sanguine, matter-of-fact fashion, she decided it was time to start.
After a course of immunotherapy, the tumor vanished, giving Rhodes even more determination to look back and look ahead. Her immediate priority? “The 6,000 garments that had been stored away downstairs,” said the designer.
Looking back has been emotional, she admitted, but also satisfying.
She’s decided to donate relevant fabrics to museums that already own her designs including LACMA, Cooper Hewitt and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. They will be displayed alongside the looks.
The 86 chests of clothing and fabrics that are currently sitting in a room downstairs have been traveling the world as part of her retrospective, “A Lifelong Love Affair With Textiles.”
The paperwork, deals and accounting books from her 50-plus years in business are going to De Montfort University in Leicester, England, and she’s already made plans for the Rainbow Penthouse to be transformed into a study area for the Zandra Rhodes Foundation.
In the midst of it all she’s looking ahead and buzzing with energy. Her outlook is even brighter than her electric pink bob.
Although she stopped producing seasonal collections during lockdown, Rhodes has done at least one collaboration a year since then, with old friends and new.
Last year she teamed with the Australian accessories designer Poppy Lissiman on a capsule collection of sunglasses and handbags, while in 2022, she partnered with John Fluevog, working her signature 1970s Wiggle prints and blindingly bright colors into the Canadian designer’s distinctive styles.
“Fluevogs are for tripping the light fantastic,” Rhodes declared at the time.
Over the years there have been collaborations with Ikea, Free People and Happy Socks, while earlier this summer Rhodes unveiled a collaboration with the Spanish clothing label Celia B (not to be confused with her old friend Celia Birtwell). Rhodes added print to Celia B’s extravagant, ruffled dresses and breezy caftan styles.
Now Rhodes is ready to move on to interiors and eager to apply her trippy, free-flowing patterns to wallpaper, home fabrics and rugs.
She sketches daily, using large Japanese rice paper notebooks and felt-tip pens. The rice paper absorbs the ink beautifully, she said. Asked if she’d ever join David Hockney and design on a digital device, she said absolutely not.
“I do not use an iPad. I paint, and I draw. And I wish David didn’t use an iPad either,” said Rhodes, who adores Hockney and strongly recommends the London show “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),” which features large-scale projections of the artist’s work.
She and her team are giving back, too, teaching painting and drawing classes live and online. The flowery sneakers she’s wearing for the interview were the fruit of a painting class that she and her team taught online during lockdown, while the launch party of the Celia B collection in June included a fashion drawing class.
In addition to being a hoarder, Rhodes is also a self-confessed workaholic and strikingly similar to the fresh-faced designer who took the American department stores by storm in 1969, wearing white, knee-high Biba boots and red, drawn-on curls, and with chiffon dress samples draped over one arm.
Rhodes said her arrival in America all those years ago was like a fairy tale.
“Diana Vreeland absolutely raved about my things and insisted they went on a photo shoot with Natalie Wood. Then she phoned up [Henri] Bendel and told them, ‘Darling, you’ve got to have these clothes!’ There were all sorts of adventures I didn’t realize I was having at the time,” said Rhodes, who is healthy, happy and ready for more.
