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The frill of it allRobin Muir looks back at the exuberant genius of Zandra Rhodes,
as photographed by Clive Arrowsmith, Vogue October 1971H
ow to look more beautiful than you’ve ever looked
before? The best approach, Vogue concluded, was
to “dance in a cloud of chiffon and colours. Fly like
a bird.” This flurry of a dress, its scalloped edge
trimmed in red, was created by Zandra Rhodes – who also
designed the print of hot pink peonies and bright orange
chrysanthemums. Inspired by finds at a Soho button shop and
shapes taken from Henri Matisse’s artworks, she called the
design Button Flower. It was the hero of her collection for a/w
1971, which the magazine felt was her most significant yet.
At the height of the ’70s, it seemed that hardly an issue
passed by without featuring a Zandra Rhodes ensemble in
striking hues. Or a portrait of the designer herself, neon-
bright, a pink-haired pop culture persona for the times. At
her most exotic, Rhodes’s designs teetered along the knife
edge of dubious taste. “Awful colours, aren’t they?” Dame
Zandra conceded to this title in 1978, “but there is something
smart about this cheap, horrible pink. When I can’t decidewhat colours I’ll have for my collections, I try to think of
what colour really grates.”
It’s 50 years since Rhodes showed her first collection,
catching the eye of two influential supporters: Beatrix
Miller and Diana Vreeland, at British and American Vogue
respectively. “She’s 1971’s number one creator,” declared a
press ad, with “a poet’s eye, an original paintbrush and some
enchanted scissors”. Her efforts crystallised, and in 1972
she was named Designer of the Year.
The fashion world reveres her now as much as ever. For
his first solo show at Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli asked
Rhodes to reimagine for him a colour palette straight out of
a Hieronymus Bosch artwork. (Her shocking-pink hair was
prominent on his moodboard.) This month, a retrospective
opens at London’s Fashion & Textile Museum, which Rhodes
founded in 2003. “I’m grateful my mother called me Zandra- with a Z – and not Mary,” she once told Vogue. “A certain
amount of electricity through a quirk of fate...” n
“When I can’t
decide what
colours I’ll
have for my
collections, I
think of what
really grates”10-19-Archive.indd 151 16/07/2019 13:39