As designer Dame Zandra Rhodes points out in her memoir Iconic: My Life in Fashion in 50 Objects, you can’t dye your hair hot pink and not expect people to talk about it. While Technicolour tresses have become more mainstream, sporting a neon fuchsia bob is still a calling card – especially if you’re 83.
And so it’s not surprising that in this survey of her life and work, told through a very loose array of 50 possessions, number 36 is Pinkissimo hair dye by Crazy Color. It has, after all, been a staple of hers since the 1980s.
Rhodes has lived a colourful life and has the receipts to prove it. The day she was born, in Chatham in September 1940, her parents had to dash to the hospital during an air raid. Her mother had spent the mid-30s in Paris, arriving alone with no French, or experience, to find a job as a pattern-cutter at a couture house. Later, she was a senior fashion lecturer at the Medway College of Art. She was also the bestower of Rhodes’ unusual first name, having been talked out of “Xandra” because no one would know how to pronounce it.
An artistic child, Rhodes loved to draw; her sketchbooks accompanying her through art college, London’s swinging 60s and up to the present day. Rather than photographs, Iconic is illustrated with Rhodes’ pen and ink sketches. This is a double-edged sword – it’s wonderful to see her work, but photographs of some of the objects would have prevented constant googling of images by this reader, avid to see more of the people, places and things she describes.
We follow Rhodes across the Atlantic where she first met Diana Vreeland, one of the many “dear friends” who help turn her from an insanely hard-working London textile designer to a bona fide fashion star (“In just one hour, Mrs Vreeland transformed my entire life. She was so over the top. Everything about her was glorious.”)
By the 1970s, Rhodes was rubbing shoulders with the beau monde – as evidenced by chapter titles which include “Andy Warhol’s Wig”, “Diana Ross’s Turban”, and “Karl Lagerfeld’s Fan” – as well as the Royal Family.
Her eye for detail and extraordinary access make for delicious anecdotes, such as when she did a fitting for Princess Margaret: “As I went to sit down on the couch, I noticed a petit-point cushion with a message embroidered on it that read ‘It’s not easy being a princess.’ To this day, I still wonder who might have given it to her.” She also spots that the Princess’s tea cup has been prefilled, perhaps with “her favourite tipple”, a gin and tonic.
Rhodes faces the highs – dressing Freddie Mercury in a cloak that “helped him become what he wanted to be – a flamboyant, boundary-breaking peacock”; turning catwalk shows into a theatrical art form; opening the Fashion and Textile Museum in London – with the same head-down, hard-work ethic as she does the lows: closing failing stores, losing loved ones to the Aids crisis, falling out of fashion in the 1990s, and getting a cancer diagnosis in 2020, for which she is now in remission.
She is a survivor, and one with so many extraordinary stories that I suspect the framing of this book, with its 50 objects, was a canny move by an editor keen to wrestle yards of material into a more manageable pattern.
There’s much to enjoy here, whether it’s the insider intel offered about the fashion business or the glam-dram gossip about high-flying friends. It’s wildly maximalist, absolutely fabulous (of course there’s a chapter on the show and Rhodes’ cameo in an episode), and we leave the author, as ever, living la vie en rose.
Published by Bantam, £25