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When you’re given six months to live, you get things done. In 2020 British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes was told by her doctor that she faced terminal cancer. She kept the news from all but her closest circle — “I didn’t want anyone to think I couldn’t work!” — while also putting her affairs in order. For Rhodes, who launched her fashion career in the late 1960s and is an indisputable national treasure, this involved making plans for 6,000 garments from decades of runway shows.
Five years on, in remission and with an energy that would be remarkable for any 84-year-old, she has established a foundation to preserve her legacy and catalogued the bulk of those garments.
And on June 17, 92 lots, including a chiffon dress from the 1985 “India Revisited” collection worn by Diana, Princess of Wales (low estimate £10,000), go on sale at Kerry Taylor Auctions in London. It’s the start of a second act for the archive, as it makes its way into the permanent collections of major international institutions, while further sales are planned to benefit the foundation.
“When Zandra had her diagnosis, we moved really fast,” says milliner Piers Atkinson, a long-term friend of Rhodes who is now head of the foundation and responsible for archiving. “We set up a mini-studio, hung up each garment, shot it front and back, numbered and logged it. There are 80 trunks. When one is done, we put a red cross on it. It’s been amazing to observe how the aesthetic adapted to each era. Some things I’d heard about but never seen. There was punk in the 1970s, with the hand-dyed beads on safety pins, and a more angular look in the ’80s.”
Garments, sketches and swatches are currently coming and going as the foundation develops partnerships with De Montfort University in Leicester, the University for the Creative Arts in south-east England and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. “We had a trunk back from Newham College that had been in storage on campus for a long time, and moths had got to it,” says Atkinson. Rhodes, sanguine, wasn’t fussed: “Those weren’t a great loss.”
The Zandra Rhodes archive has seen some jeopardy, such as when the designer’s old storage unit flooded in 1995. It was a low point in her career. Helmut Lang and Jil Sander were by then the most influential names in an industry sold on minimalism. McQueen’s radical darkness was incoming; romance was out. “It was the era of the little black dress,” says Rhodes. “So, I moved into creating costume for operas.”
For all its twists and turns, going in and out of fashion, the Zandra Rhodes aesthetic has always been light, bright and bohemian. Think Donna Summer in a dress first seen in the 1973 Lily and Shell at the Savoy collection on the cover of her 1977 Once Upon a Time album. “That’s a style still made to order today,” says Atkinson. The studio remains very much active, with licensing and one-offs. Atkinson used archive fabric for a hat for Chappell Roan to wear to the Grammys this year, while vintage was pulled from the trunks for Sarah Jessica Parker to wear in the new season of And Just Like That, just as she did in Sex and the City back in 2003.
The Rhodes journey has been defined by her graphics. She calls herself “a print maker who couldn’t get a job as one”, and the storage below her penthouse in Bermondsey, south-east London, above the Fashion and Textile Museum (now part of Newham College) that she inaugurated in 2003, houses hundreds of silkscreens and thousands of line drawings. “I’ve always sketched, everywhere I travel,” she says. “That’s the starting point. Then there’s a textile design on paper, a screen, and then we handprint from it. Then, often, we cut around the shapes in the print to create the shape of a sleeve and neck.”
It would be impossible for Rhodes to pick a favourite print or collection, but if pushed, it might be the work she created on her first trip to Australia in 1971, when she sketched the landscape around Uluru. “There was no one there in those days,” she says. “It was truly wild. The prints came from my sketches of shrubs and spinifex grass. I created toile de Jouy-style scenes on felt and chiffon. Those were the dresses that were worn by Jackie Kennedy and Lauren Bacall. I’ve given screens, textile designs and related garments to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and Powerhouse in Sydney, because the country was so inspirational to me.”
Rhodes’s image and personality have often eclipsed her work. But the designs have frequently been just as radical. When she went to see Diana Vreeland at US Vogue in 1969, the editor told her: “You are an idea-ist who knows how to execute things. You have a great sense of colour. These are wearable dreams.” She turned down offers of becoming an in-house print designer for both Oscar de la Renta and Yves Saint Laurent when they refused to add her name alongside theirs on garments.
Atkinson and Rhodes are preparing to send parts of the archive to the V&A in London and the Harris Museum in Preston, and are working on a project for Christie’s. “We are also going to my friend Andrew Logan’s museum in Wales soon to pick up 500 rolls of my printed chiffon fabric,” says the designer, who was made a Dame in 2015. “We’d really love other people to use some of the old fabric,” says Rhodes. “We see brands copy what we’ve done, and that’s interns taking things from Pinterest rather than doing any research. I’d like to see someone like John Galliano or Marc Jacobs use the material to create something new. Which is really what the foundation is about — preserving methodology and inspiring future generations.”
Passion for Fashion Featuring Zandra Rhodes Archive is at Kerry Taylor Auctions, June 17
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