pictureEver since she arrived in heady ’60s London with her signature acid-coloured geometric bag, zig-zag eyebrows and pink hair, Zandra Rhodes has prided herself on taking the road less travelled. It’s ironic, then, that she’s chosen to tell her life story “in 50 objects,” a narrative technique that’s become standard practice over the past 15 years. But such a contradiction is unlikely to give Rhodes much pause. Instead, she presses on unconcerned, on the evidence of having run through a life that’s best told in, at least, “Andy Warhol wigs” and “Diana Ross turbans,” breathlessly and unreflectively.
The weakest point of this incomplete approach is that it creates puzzling gaps. Why, for example, did this self-described academically bright and conscientious girl fail to complete her over-11 exams and grammar school? Did she not disappoint? Such stumbles are brushed aside in a story of progress and improvement for this woman from Chatham, Kent, who speaks again and again of her refusal to care about other people’s expectations.
Iconic’s episodic structure, with illustrations from Rose’s sketchbooks, occasionally slows down to paint a memorable portrait. Her mother, Beatrice, seems an extraordinary character: in the 1930s, a working-class Londoner travelled to Paris and got a job with the Worth family despite not speaking French. After the war, Beatrice took up a teaching position, became head of fashion at Medway College of Art and ran a lucrative dressmaking business on the side. All of this is brought together in a section entitled “Flyspray”, a reference to the fact that Mrs Rose once sprayed a stinging insecticide on her hair, mistaking it for the usual silver paint used to finish off her exotic hairstyles. The connection seems contrived, to say the least.
“I was in awe of my mother. We weren’t friends. I was an extension of her ambition,” Rose writes in a rare moment of self-reflection. But generally she prefers to emphasize her own utter self-sufficiency. When an old school friend writes out of the blue to apologise for how she and her friends had laughed at Zandra on the school bus because of her odd outfits, Rose replies flatly: “Well, that’s nice, but I never noticed anyone laughing.”
The ridicule didn’t last long. At the Royal College of Art in the early ’60s, Rose found her people, but by this point she was a textile artist, not a fashion designer. Early successes included Heal buying some of her final show as decorative fabric. After a few false starts and some encouragement from Diana Vreeland of American Vogue, Rose launched her fashion career. Even then, the emphasis was on fabric rather than line. Hallucinatory clashes of colour and pungent acids made clothes Zandri-fied (her word) rather than clever cuts or complex constructions.
By the ’70s, Rose’s fame had spread enough that Princess Anne posed in her dress for her engagement portrait. The dress was a delicate, figure-flattering cloud of sheer off-white fabric with embroidered lace shells and a cinched waist. (Prince Philip insisted that his daughter wear a full undergarment to avoid inappropriate transparency.) It was the first of several royal commissions, including dresses for Princess Margaret and Princess Diana. Rose was happy to admit that beneath her relentlessly eccentric self-expression, there beat an Archers-loving, 10pm-in-bed, monarchist heart. In 2014, Rose was made a Dame.
The glossy gossip is sadly limited – Francis Bacon was pretty nasty, and Vivienne Westwood apparently got annoyed whenever Rose was called the High Priestess of Punk – but most people are “genuinely wonderful”, including, of course, Joanna Lumley, whose ’90s sitcom Rose had a cameo in.
Iconic isn’t particularly enlightening or fascinating, and at its best it offers a glimpse into the struggles of being a professional, creative woman in the decades before second-wave feminism and even after: It was dangerous, it was lonely, and it was actually pretty dark.
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