“That’s the cape that Freddie Mercury tried on for his outfit that you always remember him in,” Dame Zandra Rhodes, 84, points out.
Sketchbooks are piled high on pink, Z-shaped tables from her former shop, mingled with art books documenting her most famous works — including the dress she designed for one of her royal clients, the late Princess Diana. “She wore that when she announced she was pregnant,” says Rhodes.
She also unwittingly designed Princess Anne’s engagement dress. “I didn’t know it was for her. Vogue rang me up and said, ‘We’re dressing a very important woman, send some important dresses over’. I thought it would be Elizabeth Taylor,” Rhodes recalls. “Then, about six weeks later, Norman Parkinson rang me up and said, ‘It’s your dress’.”
A huge painting taking up most of one wall sparked a lawsuit, then a friendship, with the late artist Duggie Fields. “I had to have it, so I gave him a deposit,” she says. “Then I got to know him because he came to me to sue me for the rest of the money. I had to pay off in installments.”
Rhodes is an avid collector, both of people and their art, and her home is a technicolour testament to her collaborative process. “It constantly evolves, mainly through the objects,” she says. “A lot of the people who become my close friends are usually people that I’ve collected.”
‘People who become my close friends are usually people that I’ve collected.’
Rhodes masterminded the whole building, commissioning Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta to convert a Bermondsey warehouse into her Fashion and Textile Museum. The journey to creating her home was full of Rhodes’s signature serendipity. Her best friend, sculptor and performance artist Andrew Logan, lives down the street and spotted the industrial building was up for sale. “He said to me, ‘Zandra, look, you’ve always wanted to do a museum. Why don’t you get this building?’” she remembers. “I said, ‘Do you think I’m made of money?!’”
But when she ran the numbers, Rhodes realised her Notting Hill property of 45 years had increased in value enough to cover the cost of the purchase by selling it. When her application for a grant to convert the building was turned down, her late partner Salah Hassanein, the president of Warner Brothers, encouraged her. “My boyfriend Salah said, ‘You can’t give up now’.” He suggested she develop the top floors into nine apartments, using the proceeds to fund the museum.
‘Not that I intend to move out of my flat. I’m here until they carry me out.’
Rhodes kept the penthouse. Since 2000 she has watched the area transform, the Shard (she’s a fan) rising in front of her kitchen window. “Probably I couldn’t even afford a flat here now,” Rhodes muses. “Not that I intend to move out of my flat. I’m here until they carry me out.”
Shockingly from the queen of maximalism, she originally painted the space entirely white. Her friends were perturbed. “Piers Gough [the architect], who runs my foundation, said, ‘You can’t have it all white’,” she chuckles. “So we ended up with all the colours of the rainbow.”
“[My friends said] ‘You can’t have it all white. So we ended up with all the colours of the rainbow.”
The floor is a sparkling Technicolor dream, with rainbow gradient on the columns running lengthways down the top floor. Rhodes, with her shocking pink bob, finds the riot of colour and shape to be a neutral backdrop. “Funnily enough I don’t notice it,” she says. “I find it very restful up here. I could sit on the couch and just sort of dream away.”
Expanses of glazing suffuse the space with light, although she says it can get hot on sunny summer days. Then she retreats to the lower levels, where her work rooms and bedroom — wallpapered in her own prints — are located. Her planted terraces are her oasis in the city, filled with her flowers and thriving tomato plants.
The top floor comes into its own for Rhodes’s famous dinner parties, which she began throwing in the Sixties. A central round dining table was built by Rhodes and her then boyfriend Alex McIntyre in 1964 in their west London flat they rented for £10 a week. The translucent orange base lights up, and up to 14 friends can be seated around it.
It’s been host to the kind of dream dinner party guests most could only dream of, with Diana Vreeland, John Waters and Alan Rickman eating off the silver Formica top. Currently Rhodes decorates it with beautiful and unusual rocks that she and her friends have collected from their travels.
Screens from her travels in India mingle with pieces from her Ikea collection. Glittery swans glide among cacti and a chandelier of glittering Zs Logan made for her. Painted columns by a doorway were snaffled from the set of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “Nell [Campbell] was my model in 1975, before the Rocky Horror Show,” says Rhodes. “We bought the columns from a studio lot for a pound each.”
“Divine used to spend Christmas with me every year.”
Even Rhodes’s most sentimental objects are sprinkled with fabulous celebrity backstories. There’s a little wicker Gävle goat, a traditional festive Swedish ornament, that was a gift from her friend Divine, the late drag queen whose trailblazing films with Waters shocked America in the Sixties. “He loved Christmas and he used to spend Christmas with me every year,” Rhodes remembers. A paper fan was illustrated with a portrait by Karl Lagerfeld himself. “We had lovely adventures, both in Paris and in Japan, which was absolutely gorgeous.”
Her favourite celebrity client, she decides, was Lauren Bacall, who was sent over to Rhodes by fashion designer Halston. “She came to see me in my funny little studio in Bayswater,” Rhodes remembers. “You had to walk up all these rickety stairs, and then I fitted her. She stepped on a pin and I had to get down and remove the pin from her foot.” Despite the snafu, Bacall looked fabulous in her pieces. “That was a wonderful memory.”
With such a storied career, one might imagine she’s met a famous face she doesn’t like, but Rhodes is unfailingly positive about everyone — even fellow creatives whose oeuvre she doesn’t gel with. She’s not a fan of Tracey Emin’s art, but found her adorable in person. “She’s actually very, very nice,” she says. “That’s what’s worse — she’s charming.” Similarly Grayson Perry has “lousy pots, but a great brain”.
While friends and memories are a core part of her decorating scheme, Rhodes is surprisingly unsentimental. Being surrounded by her previous work doesn’t spur introspection. “You cut yourself off and go on to the next thing,” she says. “I hope that, as a Virgo, I always do the best I can.” She claims not to have much truck with star signs, but then again Virgos are “meticulous and boring — I think I’m that, but I disguise it with a bit of colour.”
Rhodes most travelled
⬤ The object I’d save from a fire: “If I had to save one. Oh, my God. I’d probably pick the bust [by Andrew Logan, top right in main picture] to remember what I looked like after I’ve been through a fire and all that. I had a very conservative boyfriend and Andrew was worried that I would get rid of my pink hair. The original is in the National Gallery. But I didn’t change my hair in the end.”
⬤ My favourite colour: “I suppose pink’s predominant, but I like a mixture of rainbows.” Dream celebrity house swap “I’d go and live at Andrew’s, which is also full of wonderful objects. Because there’d be memories of me and memories of the same friends.”
⬤ Favourite interiors shop: “I don’t have time to visit interiors shops, but I pick up so many things on my travels. I don’t shop online or browse social media — other people do that for me.”
She may be a self-diagnosed “hoarder”, but she’s uninterested in examining where this drive to collect stems from. “I think I just collect things if I like them,” she says. Her aversion to navel gazing was finally confronted when it came to writing her new book, Iconic: My Life in 50 Objects. “I hadn’t realised how difficult it would be,” Rhodes says of the writing process — another collaboration, this time with journalist Ella Alexander.
“It was quite amazing, making myself delve into my past. I keep a lot of it all hidden and bottled up.”
“I normally plough on with what I’m doing and get on with the next set of designs.” It was this determined mentality that saw her soldier through a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2020. She went through chemotherapy in lockdown and is now in remission.
Her memoir centres on the objects she keeps in her home, and some of them unearthed buried memories and secret histories. “It was quite amazing, making myself delve into my past. I keep a lot of it all hidden and bottled up, like my father’s background or boyfriends that I’d have written off.” Her grandmother was murdered by her lover in the Twenties, leaving Rhodes’s father to be raised by alcoholic relatives.
“You cut yourself off and go on to the next thing.”
Their relationship was strained, and Rhodes was much closer to her mother, who instilled in her a love of fashion and championed her arts education.
But there is no time to wallow. Her penthouse is currently stacked with giant metal trunks, stuffed with what she estimates to be some 6,000 dresses to sort through. The Met and the V&A will be dropping by soon, keen to add them to their collections. “When I go, this part of the museum will be the Zandra Rhodes Foundation,” she says. “It keeps me busy.” With that, she’s back to work again.
