Editor’s Note: This fourth WWD feature article via the Fairchild Fashion Archives reproduces a December 31, 1975 interview in London with the talented Zandra Rhodes, as well as a February 15, 1977 interview in Paris with the iconic Madame Grès.
London – Behind the anonymous blue door on Porchester Road (the area London estate agents euphemistically describe as “‘up and coming'”) isa hive of activity where Zandra Rhodes and her team of workers hand print, make up and finish her romantic fantasy designs.
“When Bill Blass was here, I found it very difficult to show him ’round,'” says Rhodes in her thick Cockney drawl. “You know how great he is – but he wanted to see everything.”
“She represents an original approach to clothing,” says Blass, who met Rhodes a few years ago while doing a show in Palm Beach. “In London, she and Jean Muir are the ones making worldwide contributions to fashion.”
Other greats to climb the three flights of stairs stacked with cardboard boxes and fabric rolls include Evangeline Bruce, Marietta Tree, Britt Ekland,Pat Harmsworth, Lady Lichfield and Pauline de Rothschild, who thinks Rhodes “is the most talented designer in the world”.
“Tony Snowdon brought his children for tea and said he wanted to make a film here. No one was ever mean about it, but I think a lot of the ladies were nervous at first: It’s quite disconcerting to change in front of a dozen girls waiting and processing ’round you when you’re used to a comfortable dressing room. When Lauren Bacall came here for the first time, – says Rhodes, – she stepped right on a peg. I didn’t know what to say. But she is such a sensational lady. She says I’m the worst dresser she knows because she always catches me in jeans looking scary.”
Whether she’s wearing jeans or her own designs, Zandra Rhodes looks quirky, never hideous. Her hair changes color to match her mood: It is now dark brown with a peacock blue plume. She circles the eyes with the same color and adds a blue beauty drop or two. She is small, strong and tough like a terrier, expecting high standards and conscientiousness from the people who work for her. She herself works 14 hours, starting at 7:30 in the morning “I’m always at work, even on Sunday. I can’t seem to separate work from pleasure.”
The London store she opened in June has eased the pressure considerably, she says. It’s run by Anne Knight – ‘England’s Gerry Stutz’ – and means customers go straight to the shop, rather than the studio. However, Rhodes complains about the lack of space to design and work, and is looking for bigger premises. She is currently using the front room of her colorful apartment nearby to house cutters.
The cut fabric is transported to Porchester Road, put into plastic bags and handed to one of two dozen girls sardinated in the room among boxes of feathers, frocks, threads and sewing machines. The only heating is from paraffin fires. “People always tell me what a fire hazard this place is.”
A finished chiffon dress is “a work of art,” claims Rhodes. At the London store, a dress costs around $600 and the customer is presented with a silk certificate printed with Rhodes’ signature: “This is one of my special dresses, I think of it as a work of art that you will treasure forever,” signed from her and counted. “With my type of clothes at prices, I maintain that every garment should be exclusive.”
Sixty-five percent of the customers who come into the store are Americans, Rhodes says. “When we opened it I thought, ‘I’m going to fall flat on my face with this, but since then, the business has tripled.'” She is planning to open a similar store in New York by the fall.
Would she consider living in the United States? “I can too. I like it there, it’s very, very inspiring, but I haven’t decided.”
America gave Zandra Rhodes her first chance as a designer almost 10 years ago. “I initially flew over because Paul Young said he would support me. He does not…but in my pocket, I had several letters of introduction—one to Gerry Stutz. She liked the little collection I had brought.”
“I feel differently about Zandra than other designers,” says Stutz, who says the designer “has been part of the store. [Henri Bendel] for five or six years. She is not a professional designer, but rather an artist who has chosen clothing as a medium. She is talented and smart. Her interpretation of the Bicentennial, for example – her cactus prints (from her spring collection) are brilliant. Her glorious fantasy clothes. They are all about style and nothing about fashion. They are timeless, spectacular, wonderful to wear and wonderful to look at.”
According to Rhodes, “Americans go up and down whether they feel classic or not. Fortunately, these days, my ‘fancy dresses’, as they call them, have become status symbols.
Rhodes first trained as a textile designer at Medway College and then the Royal College of Art, where her contemporaries included emerging young talents David Hockney, Ossie Clark and Janice Wainwright. Her father was a lorry driver and her mother, before becoming a senior lecturer at the First College of Art in Rhodes, was a fitter at Worth in Paris. (Her aunt, she says, is Ena Twigg, the famous medium—”everything that scares me, I don’t want to know. I only know her as my aunt.”)
In college, Rhodes says, she was the blue-eyed babe, but when she left she was told her designs were unusable, too extreme. She built her prints with Alex McIntyre (who still works for her) and approached designers directly. “Then I thought it was funny to be such an intermediary, especially since I always think about how the garment will look when I design the print. A friend gave me three lessons in pattern cutting and that’s how it all started.”
Her prints still permeate everything she does, Rhodes says. “I want to build the interior design side and focus on my drawings. Everyone who knows me is very aware of the expendable aspects,” says Rhodes, citing as another talent the metal drawings she has begun to make, exquisitely framed in pleated satin.
“I surround myself with people who do things, so that work and play blend together.” Her circle of friends in London includes Adel Rootstein, Duggie Fields, Andrew Logan and Carol McNicoll, the potter.
Her ambitions are to learn to delegate more, “because that’s the only way I can have more time to design” and to be placed in stores all over the world.
“I’m coming into my own now, doing better and better work,” says Rhodes, unabashedly. “Fashion for me is very exciting because I can do what I want –the sky’s the limit – that’s how lucky I am.”
