London Link - Moda em Museu

Zandra Rhodes

by Leda Senise*

The Women's Library has promoted a cycle of lectures with meaningful female names of several professional areas: "TurningPoints". Zandra Rhodes' name was a choice inspired in the fashion design area.

Graduated in textile design by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1964, Rhodes was distinguished in the Londoner vanguard in the 60's and 70's by the vibrant and eccentric brightness of her creations. She dressed rock stars, artists, princesses and plebeians, joining sensibly her extravagant personality to her differentiated clients. The sweet Natalie Wood and the elegant and discreet Princess Diana were her clients.

Sensitive traveler, her creations were inspired in the nature and in the culture of the places she used to visit. From the Red Indians, passing through Mexico and India, Zandra, a very good drawer created textile drawings, shapes and colors extremely sophisticated, which immediately transformed the models of her collections in special pieces.

She escaped from the huge industrialization and from the fashion marketing dictatorship becoming a personality, not a brand. To have one Zandra Rhodes is forever.

At the beginning of her career, unhappy with the use her employees made of her drawings ,she decided to draw her own models and opened in the 70's her first store on Fulham Road ( according to her a real commercial failure), obligatory point for the moderns and originals from all over the world.

Rhodes trusts the differentiation and in the originality as a personal style and creation. She is a great woman but she isn't a big woman. In her lecture she dressed on, what certainly was an authentic Jean Muir old gold. Her hair which had already been red, orange and green , today is pink. Her accessories, all artistic pieces, are huge and in plural: necklaces, brooches, earrings, armbands and rings. In her hair, tied in a knot, an arrangement of flowers and beats both pink and brilliant in a Mexican/Japanese inspiration! And Zandra Rhodes has 60 years old!!

How to define this figure? Delightful!

The way of originality certainly isn't one of the easiest. Zandra talked generously about her international career and advised with her deep and paused voice:

"-Don't waste your time with whom doesn't want you."

Showed slides of her collections and of her most recent turning points: the opera "The Magic Flute" that she drew for San Diego Opera and The Fashion and Textile Museum: an impressive task.

Worried with the preservation of the creations from British designers from today, Rhodes has already built, with the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta's signature, a colorful building which should be inaugurated with 3 simultaneous exhibitions in 2002.. Besides being documentation and fashion preservation organ it will also be a center of graduation and interchange for fashion students and professionals of whole world.

The beautiful building stands up in south of London, not far from Tate Modern , the "the place to be" in the following years. It is four years of tireless and enviable work. How did she get it? Rhodes answers frankly with an ironic touch.
"- Asking money to the rich..."

It is worth to visit her site. Rhodes is an example of determination and credibility which should serve as inspiration for the ones who believe in making fashion isn't simply renders to the trends, almost always commercial and few originals, but making fashion can be also making Art.

Fashion and Textile Museum - 83 Bermondsey Street - London, SE1 3XF

Leda Senise is a multidisciplinary artist in Scenic Arts and Communication. She has been working since the beginning of her career in publicity and arts as
an editor, as a marketing and communication projects maker. She was responsible for Forum's communication and marketing project as a whole in its first five years, she passed by Fiorucci and Zoomp, among others. She has created shows, catwalks, exhibitions, campaigns, differentiated communication and trade processes for fashion brands where she worked. She directed art and costumes for hundreds of advertisements. She has dressed all our movie and theatre actors and made opera and ballet scenarios and costumes for the Municipal Theatre in Sao Paulo, Guaíra Teatre in Curitiba, Municipal Theatre in Rio de Janeiro. She walked around the world privately and as a scholar student with an allowance given by the British Council, interested in creation, costume storage and epoch productions and in the uncountable creation and technological intersections in these areas. At the moment, she develops research about language and formats in cinema and theatre in London, research which will serve as the base for her doctorate thesis at "Universidade de São Paulo".