Born in Chatham, Kent in 1940, Zandra Rhodes is a fashion and textile designer and founder of the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. Known for her bold, outlandish use of colours and prints, she has dressed royalty and pop culture’s most famous, from Princess Diana to Debbie Harry. Rhodes has appeared in Absolutely Fabulous, and won a Daytime Emmy award for costume design in 1979. Her memoir, Iconic, has just been published.
Makeup artists are good at making you blossom, and my good friend Richard Sharah was wonderful at this. I am in a dress I designed after a trip I took across America in 1974 in a Volkswagen camper. It was gorgeous; and inspired my Cactus Cowboy collection. A wonderful period of my life.
I first started dyeing my hair in 1973. When Vidal Sassoon brought out coloured wigs I gave them a try, but they pinched my head. Instead I realised I could colour it myself: it’s been green – like the colour of dried grass – pink and blue. I dyed it brown just once but it lasted two weeks as I found the experience so horribly embarrassing. Pink doesn’t require too much maintenance, so that’s why it’s stayed that colour.
My mum, Beatrice, didn’t dress like anyone else. She had a passion for style and once worked as a pattern cutter for the couture brand, House of Worth. She would collect me from school dressed to the nines. I’d say: “Please don’t come looking different from all the other mothers.” She always did. Once she sprayed her hair silver and then got a lacquer to set it. We were on a train and she kept saying: “My head keeps stinging.” It turns out she’d covered her head in fly spray.