
Zandra Rhodes on a life colouring outside the lines
Everything about Dame Zandra Rhodes is vibrant: her appearance, her work, her home, her personality. Here, the acclaimed textile designer reflects on a life lived in technicolour
Zandra Rhodes’ hair is the colour of a lollipop (actual shade: Pinkissimo by Crazy Color). She’s veered between this and bright green for about 40 years. But her lurid locks are merely the opening act for her face: in the past, the designer would shave her hairline to make room for more embellishments, as though her features were a canvas. And in a way, they are – Rhodes uses red lipstick to draw swirls around her eyes. She plucks her eyebrows to replace them with blue arcs or pink dashes.
When we talk via video call, the designer doesn’t disappoint, donning a turquoise dress, shimmering eyeshadow and lashes drawn on below her eyes, 1960s-style. At 84, and four foot 11 inches tall, she’s diminutive in her chair as her assistant helps her set up the necessary tech. “Maximalism makes a statement. I try to make everything my own personal self-expression, because if I looked like someone else, then I wouldn’t be me. It’s my way of facing the world.”
Rhodes’ personal aesthetic mirrors the striking textile designs she has spent her career creating, for which she was made a dame in 2015 (the designer, true to form, arrived at Buckingham Palace in a hat topped with a rhinestone egg).

She opened her first boutique on the Fulham Road in 1968, four years after graduating from the Royal College of Art. A year later, the shop went out of business. Rhodes then worked out of her studio, which sat at the top of a rickety staircase on Bayswater’s Porchester Road. When she released her first solo collection, the then-editor of American Vogue, Diana Vreeland, featured the pieces, modelled by Rebel Without a Cause actor Natalie Wood, and the rest, as they say…
Rhodes’ designs are bold yet feminine with occasional punky overtones – she was making garments with holes and safety pins in them, in her seminal Conceptual Chic collection, years before Versace.
Rhodes had taken America, but it wasn’t long before she felt the pull of home. A roster of stars would ascend those rickety stairs for fittings, including Freddie Mercury (he also had to clamber over Rhodes’ cannabis plants, which she was arrested for in 1986). The Queen frontman was “very shy”, says Rhodes, as she dressed him in a pleated white top that he would wear for a London concert (an image of Mercury wearing the top with his arms outstretched would become one of the most iconic taken of him). “But when I said, ‘put this on and move around in front of the mirror’, he turned into something else,” Rhodes reminisces. “It was wonderful.”

Polly Eltes and Louis de Teliga wearing Rhodes’ SS 1977 Coneptual Chic collection. Image: Clive Arrowsmith

Diana Ross in Zandra Rhodes The Renaissance/Gold Collection, AW 1981. Image: Richard Avedon
Rhodes also designed the gold-sleeved bodice worn by Diana Ross in another famous photo, taken by American photographer Richard Avedon. (Some years before, Rhodes had spotted Ross in LA, but when she approached her, the singer had threatened to close her garage door on the designer – it turns out that Ross didn’t recognise Rhodes with green hair and called the following day to apologise). One of Rhodes’ favourite commissions was Marc Bolan: “I still like looking at the videos of him in my jersey. It was only after I saw videos that I realised how spectacular he looked.”
Rhodes also dressed Princess Diana, in the beaded drop-waist dress that she wore to a state dinner in Japan with the then-Prince Charles in 1986. “It was a great honour,” says the designer. “She came into my shop [by this time, Rhodes had set up in Grafton Street in Mayfair] and tried on a beautiful black chiffon dress, but at that time royals weren’t allowed to wear black, so hers was made in pale pink with little pearls around the edge.” The designer is, she says, a royalist, and thinks the royal family is “wonderful”.
The climb to the top wasn’t easy: when Rhodes started out, she and her designs were considered too extreme for commercial success: “You’re talking about the mid-60s when there were lots of little baby florals, very safe. And suddenly I was doing zigzags, stars, pop art. They were just very distinctive and looked different from what was on the market at the time.”
In the ’70s, a beauty company executive turned down a collaboration with Rhodes because “in [their] day women who dyed their hair were of dubious virtue”. Despite this, Rhodes does not view herself as subversive, at least not in a 21st-century context. “Nowadays, it doesn’t shock people if models come out on the runway naked,” she says. “I just like to think that I design things that are happy and will make you feel great when you’re wearing them.”
Rhodes’ career, as she pointedly reminds me, is far from over. I’m about to tell her how impressive it is that she’s still working at the rate she is when she interrupts me: “That I’m still here!?” she laughs, leaving me scrabbling to correct her. Rhodes launched a homeware collection with Ikea in 2021, designed a poster for Transport for London in 2022 and her book, Iconic: My Life in Fashion in 50 Objects, was released in the summer. She also continues to be involved in the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, which she founded in 2003. To this day, she lives above it.
Housed in a pink and orange block, Rhodes’ home is a veritable detonation of colours and prints – she calls it her ‘rainbow penthouse’ because the floor tiles graduate through the visible spectrum. “On one side it’s pale pinks and yellows going into red and orange. And on the other, it’s the blues, leading out towards my camellia garden,” she enthuses. “There’s a lovely Indian screen in the corner, and then I have an Andrew Logan [the sculptor, jewellery designer and Rhodes’ best friend] sculpture of me with mirrored hair, and a wonderful chandelier shaped like a crinoline lady – she’s amongst great big cactuses. It’s all very me.”

Zandra Rhodes wearing her Conceptual Chic Collection, SS 1978. Image: Eric Boman

Zandra Rhodes working in her design studio, 1985. Image: Robyn Beeche.
It was in this eccentric space, on the technicolour tiles, that Rhodes hosted her famous dinner parties, where John Waters, Lulu, Britt Ekland and Vreeland, the woman who gave Rhodes her first break, numbered among guests. Nowadays, her abode is a revolving door of students and interns who have nowhere to stay; she takes them under her wing and cooks them vegetable soup on a Sunday.
The rainbow penthouse was the locus of another seminal, but rather less positive, moment in Rhodes’ life: she was doing a yoga session with Logan in 2020 when she felt a lump in her stomach. It was cancer of the bile duct, which the doctor said would end her life within six months. Rhodes went through chemotherapy (while being characteristically unphased at the prospect of losing her hair due to the abundance of pink wigs that she already owned) and is now in remission.
The diagnosis spurred Rhodes to get her affairs in order – the bleaker stuff, like her will and ‘do not resuscitate’ order, but also the setting up of the Zandra Rhodes Foundation, an archive of her massive body of work (6,000 dresses, to be exact). Rhodes didn’t tell anyone about her cancer for fear of work slowing down.
There is one thing that can be said about the designer with ironclad certainty: she works like a mule. Rhodes’ idea of heaven isn’t reclining on a beach on the equator, but “creating a new textile design that looks fabulous”. Her idea of hell is – you guessed it – “no work”. It’s a trait that she inherited from her mother, Beatrice, a teacher and dressmaker who, Rhodes has reflected, never relaxed. She also inherited her mother’s sense of style: Beatrice would do the school run in green lizard-skin platforms and once accidentally put fly spray in her hair rather than silver hairspray.
When it comes to romantic relationships, Rhodes has discussed how her appearance has routinely become an issue. That was until she met Salah Hassanein, the former president of Warner Bros International Theatres, when she was in her 50s. After a career spent shrugging off the judgement of supposed creatives and progressives, Rhodes found a kindred spirit in the straightest of corporate businessmen. The pair travelled together extensively – always something adventurous, like salmon fishing in Alaska – and remained in a relationship until Hassanein’s death in 2019, aged 98. In Rhodes’ home – a shrine to everything that she loves – framed photographs of him hang on the walls.
Nowadays, Rhodes mainly travels with Logan; they’ve been to Goa, India, “full of friends and inspiration”, which is her favourite place in the world, and Morocco, where they spent their days drawing in the Atlas Mountains. Rhodes only wishes that she’d had a chance to visit Machu Picchu (“I don’t think I’d be strong enough to get up there now,” she sighs). As worldly as she is, the designer’s ideal day would be spent in Berriew in Wales, the home of Logan’s Museum of Sculpture, “[staying] in his cottage by the river and [picking] blackberries”, or perusing the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the former home of the neo-classical architect, which is stacked with all manner of antiquities (“I don’t know what the dusting would have been like,” quips Rhodes).
A few years ago, Rhodes received a letter from someone she knew in childhood apologising for laughing at the way she looked. Rhodes’ response? That it was a nice gesture, but she’d never noticed anyone laughing at her. She has a remarkably singular outlook on life which seems totally immune to its norms and pressures. She’s also unfailingly positive, refusing to be drawn into a misanthropic rant about ‘the good old days’ when I ask her about how the fashion industry has changed: “You can find good and bad things in anything, but you can’t focus on the bad, otherwise we’d all get too depressed. We’ve got to ride along with the excitement of what’s possible.” And, of course, there was her heartening response to her cancer diagnosis, which Rhodes described to The Guardian as “rather wonderful, really”.
“I think we’ve always got to say, ‘it might get better’. Not, ‘oh, it was better like that’,” the designer continues. “I mean, what is one going on living for otherwise? You’ve just got to accept change and, if you’re lucky enough, be part of that change.”