Zandra Rhodes
| Dame Zandra Rhodes DBE RDI |
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|---|---|
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| Born |
Zandra Lindsey Rhodes 19 September 1940 Chatham, Kent, England |
| Occupation | Fashion designer |
Dame Zandra Lindsey Rhodes, DBE RDI (born 19 September 1940), is an English fashion designer.
Rhodes was born in Chatham, Kent, and was introduced to the world of fashion by her mother, who was a fitter in a Paris fashion house and a teacher at Medway College of Art, now the University for the Creative Arts. Rhodes studied first at Medway and then at the Royal College of Art in London. Her major area of study was printed textile design.
Rhodes' early textile fashion designs were considered outrageous by the traditional British manufacturers.
Between 1966-69, Rhodes and a fellow student, Sylvia Ayton, opened a boutique together called the Fulham Road Clothes Shop. Ayton designed the clothing and Rhodes supplied the textile designs from which they were made. She produced her first collection showing loose, romantic garments.
In 1969, Rhodes and Ayton went their separate ways, with Rhodes establishing her own retail outlet in the fashionable Fulham Road in West London. Rhodes' own lifestyle has proved to be as dramatic, glamorous and extrovert as her designs. With her bright green hair (later changed to a pink and sometimes red or other colours), theatrical makeup and art jewellery, she stamped her identity on the international world of fashion.
Rhodes was one of the new wave of British designers who put London at the forefront of the international fashion scene in the 1970s. Her designs are considered clear, creative statements, dramatic but graceful, bold but feminine. Rhodes' inspiration has been from organic material and nature. Her unconventional and colourful prints were often inspired by travel; chevron stripes from the Ukraine and the symbols of the North American Indian, Japanese flowers, calligraphy and shells. Her approach to the construction of garments can be seen in her use of reversed exposed seams and in her use of jewelled safety pins and tears during the punk era.
She made her biggest splash in 1977 with the establishment take on punk which she called Conceptual Chic. She used kilts and safety pins – pre Versace – to form a sort of embroidery, mixed with loosely drawn figures screen-printed on silk jersey, or on the newly developed Ultrasuede fabric.
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