The colourful world of Zandra Rhodes: From dressing rock royalty to Indian weaves

No one would have guessed that British designer Zandra Rhodes, 86, had just landed in Chennai three hours earlier. Dressed in a colourful shirt and turquoise trousers, oversized rings jangling, brooches glinting, pink bob in place and electric-blue eyeliner unsmudged, Rhodes looks effortlessly chic, as though she woke up in the morning looking like this.

Her attire says much about her personality—unapologetic, theatrical and alive. Once, she accepted a challenge to wear black for a week and felt miserable. “I felt so boring,” she says. “I had to wear more jewellery to make it look better.” She won’t leave the house without makeup. Many years ago, she plucked out her eyebrows and drew on dots, then wiggles. “They never grew back,” she says. Her conversation is as refreshingly open as her clothes are flamboyant. “If you’re a fraud and say one thing but don’t live it yourself, then you will get caught,” she says.

She first started dying her hair in 1973, finding that coloured wigs pinched her head. She’s tried green, pink, blue and, for two weeks, brown, which she hated. For some years now, it has been pink. Her exuberance spills from her attire to the way she lives life. “I think I have just grown more and more in love with colour, with jewellery and with the fact that print can transform your mood and your fabric,” she says. “I just don’t understand why people don’t use more of it.”

I met her at the home of Annie Titus Mammen, whose design house Tambour has done embroidery for Chanel, Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton. When compared with Rhodes, Mammen looks more subdued in a plain white shirt. It might seem like they are from two different worlds, but the two have forged a friendship that has stood the test of time, travails and passing trends. They first met in 1985, when Mammen, 64, was about to start her company. Rhodes taught her the importance of protecting your designs and how much effort goes into each luxury piece. She was very supportive. “Anytime you want, you can use my name,” Rhodes told her. They formed a partnership where Rhodes took collections from Mammen each year. Their 1987 collection of saris encompassed Indian techniques like Gadwal weaving, hand block printing and painting, with drapes stylised from different regional traditions. Mammen recalls a designer telling her that they were too early. “Today, every designer is working with saris and traditional weaves,” she says. “We started way back then.”

Then, in 2025, Rhodes let Mammen go through her archive, which she calls her “Bible”, to pick designs. Together they chose five Rhodes designs which are now getting featured in a limited edition collection of finely crafted Pashmina shawls. Working on the collection, says Mammen, felt like circling back to the beginning of their shared past.

Born into a working class family in Kent during World War II, Rhodes’s mother apparently walked down from a hill to a hospital during an air raid to have her. After the war, her father drove a lorry while her mother taught at an arts college where Rhodes later studied. Her mother was, in fact, a hugely influential figure in her childhood. “She was a very exotic lady,” says Rhodes. “The house was always full of wonderful French magazines. She had a big curl, sprayed her hair silver and wore platform shoes.” The young Rhodes used to beg her not to come to school looking so different from all the other mothers.

Rhodes first emerged as a new voice in London’s fashion scene in the 1960s, fresh out of the Royal College of Art. Rather than treating fabric as a passive material, she made prints the starting point of her garments. The result was a distinctive design language in which colour, pattern, silhouette and embellishment all worked together. Her body of work has never been confined to one aesthetic. Floral prints, calligraphic motifs, flowing silk chiffons, unconventional seams and elaborate embellishments recur across her collections. Her designs have dressed royalty and rock stars alike, including Princess Diana, Princess Anne and Freddie Mercury. The pleated cape she designed for Mercury remains among her best-known creations.

In the 1970s Rhodes brought torn fabric, exposed seams and safety pins into designer fashion, anticipating punk. She was then known for beautiful printed chiffon, and her shop partner decided that a revolution deserved a statement. “My partner removed all the chiffon dresses to downstairs. And she brought in the ones with the safety pins. The result was humbling. We had them in for a week, and none of them sold. The chiffon returned upstairs, and the safety-pin pieces just became the most wonderful collector’s items,” recalls Rhodes. Of course, punk entered the fashion zeitgeist six years later with Vivienne Westwood’s designs. A decade later, when Gianni Versace showed holes and safety pins, British journalist Suzy Menkes wrote that Rhodes had done it 10 years earlier. For that, Versace banned Menkes from his shows for a season. But Rhodes herself is modest about her influence in fashion. “I just keep going, and if I’m lucky, people will still want me, and I will still have got a reason to design,” she says. 

With her love for colour and chaos, her romance with India was a given before she ever came here. Her first trip to India to study Indian crafts was in 1981 with designer Rajeev Sethi and cultural activist and writer Pupul Jayakar. It turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of her life. In 1987, she brought a sari collection with feather head-dresses and panniers to Mumbai and Delhi which shocked all the ladies. The collection was not a commercial success. No one bought the saris, but they have now become a collector’s item. The beaded dresses she did with Mammen, however, went on to becoming extremely popular and sold well in the UK and the US.

She was here in March, when she got her fill of India, attending a textile and print-making workshop in Jaipur and drawing the rocks and temples of Hampi in her sketchbook with the possibility of “even a few pieces of grass ending up as a print”.

Two days after I met Rhodes and Mammen at the latter’s home, the limited edition of pashmina shawls featuring the five Rhodes designs translated into 35 colourways debuted on a glittering evening at Chennai’s Evoluzione. From danseuse Anita Ratnam to Apollo’s Preetha Reddy, the who’s who of Chennai’s high society streamed into the fashion store. Rhodes was everywhere, posing with guests, showing off her celebrated archival prints including the ‘Painted Lady and Bows’ from her 1978 Painted Lady collection and ‘Peacock Feathers’ from the India Revisited collection of 1985. Then, of course, there were the shawls themselves, priced from Rs21,600—fun, flamboyant and fabulous, much like their designer.