Zandra Rhodes, by Gene Nocon
It’s great to watch Zandra Rhodes “bashing bankers” on Southwold Pier. The fashion designer, once dubbed the “princess of punk”, nods her trademark fuchsia pink bob furiously with glee, wielding a wooden hammer at the pop up heads that make up one of artist Tim Hunkin’s handmade machines at The Under the Pier Show.
I’m here for the launch of the new accessories collection Zandra at the Pier at Seaweed & Salt, the lifestyle shop created by Gough Hotels, the new owners of the pier. They are giving the structure, Britain’s only 20th century pier – originally built as a landing stage for Belle Steamships travelling the Suffolk coast from London Bridge in the 1930s – a rather bijou yet entirely pleasing makeover. The Gough family also own The Salthouse Harbour Hotel on Ipswich Quay, which goes out of its way to surprise with a quirky and vibrant mix of colour, art and design. Its interior includes a bright orange leather sofa with a huge copper lobster resting on the coffee table in the lobby, and what purports to be an authentic stuffed unicorn leering above the dining table, where a lively menu of local fish is served.
The lounge at the Salthouse Harbour Hotel
Today, an hour’s drive from the hotel, Zandra is dressed in one of her own dramatic aquamarine, turquoise and pink silk tunics, adorned with oversized mirrored brooches and several necklaces by her great friend Andrew Logan. She has a turquoise bow in her hair and her eye make-up is as bold as ever. It’s not how I imagine myself dressing at 73, but then Rhodes has always chosen her own path. Her commitment to vibrant colour hasn’t flagged since the late 1960s when, after graduating from London’s Royal College of Art, she shook up the British and American fashion scenes with radical collections featuring her own, now iconic, textile designs. Rhodes claims she doesn’t dress or design to stand out. “It’s nothing to do with being daring. I just put on things that make me feel good, even on a bad day. It’s my own suit of armour and I don’t care if people don’t like what I wear. I think colours make one feel happy and gorgeous.”
“Merely standing out in a crowd doesn’t make her an eccentric,” he says. “It merely makes the crowd a herd, unable to comprehend her”
Does Zandra consider herself an eccentric? “I am, in the sense that I believe in developing my own ideas and living by them and don’t care if I don’t fit in. I believe that if you’re convinced enough by what you do and what you look like, others will follow. I think I offer an alternative that is wearable and keeps evolving.” Her close friend, the artist Duggie Fields, considers that the source of her “eccentricity” (and by the same definition his own) is “living her creativity to the full”. “Merely standing out in a crowd doesn’t make her an eccentric,” he says. “It merely makes the crowd a herd, unable to comprehend her.”
Southwold Pier
I remember once going to a launch and noting how appropriately absolutely fabulous Joanna Lumley looked in Zandra Rhodes. Like Zandra, she had the confidence to wear Rhodes’ dramatic black and white silk tunic to enhance her personality rather than simply putting on an outfit.
Zandra has always designed for forward thinking style and fashion icons: from Freddie Mercury and Diana Ross to Sarah Jessica Parker’s character in Sex and the City, Agyness Deyn to Kate Moss. Zandra says she’d love to dress another Kate: Middleton. Which isn’t far-fetched in the slightest. Zandra dressed Diana, Princess of Wales. She also has a CBE, appeared on a stamp with her gold lamé design for Diana Ross from her Elizabethan collection, and even designed a pink-haired fairy for the top of the Buckingham Palace Christmas tree in 1998.
So, what would she dress Kate in? Zandra smiles mischieviously, conceding that the Duchess dresses far too safely at present, but that she’d need to meet her before trying to give her some fresh ideas with an eye to her feistier side.
Rhodes is also keen to produce another collection for Marks & Spencer, for whom she designed in 2009. She explains that she was wearing a tulip print dating back to that collection a few days earlier in London and got stopped several times on the Underground and asked where it was available. Her new Zandra on the Pier collection, of zany faux patent bags and costume jewellery, contains eminently affordable splashes of unorthodoxy. I was extremely tempted to buy a pair of over-sized, exuberant shell earrings.
“I’m designing some wonderful steamer trunks,” she says, “with prints of leopards leaping out of them and fabrics with matching motifs swirling around. The idea is to amuse and excite everyone as they wait for their newspaper wrapped packages and mangoes”
She finds travel and adventure give her most of her ideas. Over the enormous ice-cream sundaes Zandra encourages us to order from The Boardwalk restaurant, she compares notes on time spent in Mumbai and beyond, revelling in colourful descriptions of the seamier side of her journeys. India is a destination that she keeps returning to: “I’ll try to do at least one sketch or watercolour a day and usually turn that into a print when I come home.” She’s currently working on designs for the luggage carousels at Mumbai airport, alongside Manish Aronra, Rita Kumar and Andrew Logan. “I’m designing some wonderful steamer trunks,” she says, “with prints of leopards leaping out of them and fabrics with matching motifs swirling around. The idea is to amuse and excite everyone as they wait for their newspaper wrapped packages and mangoes.” (Regarding the diverse clients she designs for, she explains airily: “I exist by ducking and diving.”)
Designing for opera – both sets and costumes – continues to be a passion for Zandra, who is particularly attached to the San Diego Opera, close to where she now lives much of the year with her partner Salah Hassanein, on a silver sand beach much frequented by surfers. She also maintains a “rainbow” apartment above her Fashion & Textile Museum on Bermondsey Street, London, where she keeps her growing collection of colourful modern ceramics by Carol McNicoll and Kate Malone. Her latest local project, working with the garden installation company Cityscapes, is helping to liven up the Greenwood Theatre, part of Guy’s Hospital/King’s College University campus on the corner of nearby Weston Street, and presently a 1970s brick eyesore. “I’m painting it blue and pink,” she says. “It needs sunshine. We have TV presenter and gardener Joe Swift coming in to green-it-up and encourage people to wander around, linger and sit here.”
Zandra Rhodes’ designs for San Diego Opera’s production of The Magic Flute
She loves Bermondsey’s growing vibrancy – “Although I could argue I started the regeneration!” – and is especially fond of local restaurant Champor Champor (“mix and match”), “for its creative and colourful Malaysian-Thai food”. As to the suggestion that gentrification has cost the area some of its “edge”, she says she’s just delighted that the Museum is getting more visitors.
Endearingly, Rhodes reveals that she was out shopping at 11pm the night before, for a supper party for 20 she’s hosting before she returns to the States. So, what’s on the menu? “I’m doing my special of potato dauphinoise with lots of interesting salads. I especially adore pomegranates, ginger, red chicory and peppers in salads.”
She brings vivid colour to everything she touches. C