Dame Zandra Rhodes has told how a brush with death changed her priorities and made her determined to preserve her life’s work.
The legendary designer, whose roster of famous clients have included Princess Diana, Princess Anne, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was given six months to live in 2020, when she was diagnosed with bile duct cancer.
Inviting HELLO! into her “rainbow penthouse” in Bermondsey, South London, for an exclusive interview and photoshoot, Dame Zandra, 85, tells us how she discovered something was wrong when she felt full during a yoga session.
© Rachael Smith
“The doctor said: ‘We think you’ve got six months’. What I really don’t understand is why it didn’t throw me. I don’t know why I wasn’t frightened, but I wasn’t. I wanted to keep working, preserve my work and put my life in order,” she says.
Tragic loss
Zandra was still grieving the loss of her partner of 25 years, the former Warner Brothers executive Salah Hassanein, who had died the previous June at the age of 98. But far from falling apart, she approached her diagnosis with no-nonsense practicality and set about launching The Zandra Rhodes Foundation as a means of archiving and displaying her vast body of work to inform and inspire future generations of designers.
“I’d just coped with him dying and I suppose it made me refocus on everything, as he would have wanted me to,” she says of Salah.
On the face of it, the couple, who met at a cocktail party in New York in the mid-Nineties, were complete opposites. Nevertheless, they bonded over the things they had in common, and shared a beach house in Del Mar, California for 20 years.
© Rachael Smith
“He was totally conventional, and wore suits because of his job, but he somehow didn’t notice that I was unconventional. He was a workaholic, so he didn’t notice that I was too, which was terribly convenient. We were a nice, odd couple and we could bounce off each other. We had some wonderful times together,” she says.
“The doctor said: ‘We think you’ve got six months’. What I really don’t understand is why it didn’t throw me. I don’t know why I wasn’t frightened, but I wasn’t. I wanted to keep working, preserve my work and put my life in order.”
Royal connections
Zandra’s colourful penthouse, which sits on top of the Fashion and Textile Museum she founded in 2003, is filled with quirky items, including a mannequin wearing a pink wig and a pleated cape shirt that Zandra made for Freddie Mercury.
“Colour cheers you up,” she says. “When I get a new project, it takes over my life, then ends up being assimilated into my house.”
Among the highlights of Zandra’s varied career was receiving her damehood, for services to fashion and textiles, from Princess Anne in 2015. More than 40 years earlier, Anne had chosen one of her designs – a white chiffon gown – for the official portrait marking her engagement to Captain Mark Phillips.
“That was a total surprise,” Zandra reveals. “Vogue asked me to send in some clothes because they were going to photograph a very famous woman. It was only later that I found out it was for that photograph, and she looked wonderful.
“I know her, and I respect her terribly. She works very hard and always represents this country amazingly.”
© Rachel Smith
As for Diana, Zandra made several bespoke dresses and visited her at Kensington Palace for fittings.
“That was great fun, and she was always absolutely charming and very sweet. There were always lots of children’s toys around. There was a particularly ugly one with big horns, like a Viking – she said that was William’s favourite,” Zandra recalls.
“Once, when I did a wraparound dress for her, she said: ‘Make sure the wrap is a lot deeper than usual, because you can be sure that when I get out of the car, there’ll be a photographer at the wrong angle.’ She was great for the British fashion industry.”
Despite Zandra’s bleak initial prognosis, regular targeted immunotherapy treatment has kept her cancer at bay. She is now busy with various projects, including the exhibition Zandra Rhodes: A Life In Print, which is on display at Bath’s Holburne Museum and features an array of her vivid screen-printed garments from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.
© Rachael Smith
“Different museums across the world have things of mine that represent what my life’s work has been about. My illness has made me aware of my legacy and making sure that gets followed through.
“It’s as though it came at just the right time for me to form the foundation and find a constructive way to make sure that my work is valued and to know where it’s going.”
Zandra Rhodes: A Life in Print is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, until 10 May
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