The Rainbow Connection

Zandra Rhodes Reflects on 50 Years of Design

Everything begins — and ends — with the prints, says the designer with the highlighter-pink hair.

LONDON — The secret is in the screen-printed silks.

Dame Zandra Rhodes is ready to lift the hot pink curtain on a 50-year retrospective of her work, but the clothes — the caftans, sparkly Eighties dresses and breezy belted gowns — tell only part of the story.

Textiles, instead, are the stars of this show: They’re colorful, hand-drawn, hole-punched, cut, pleated, burnt out, appliquéd or embellished with sequined landscapes or hand-painted buttons.

In 1965, the same year she graduated from the Royal College, she created the spectacular lipstick-print belted skirt which opens the show, the little red bullets shooting in multiple directions like rocket ships.

Once she decided to work with textiles, she recalls seeing a potential client up in Manchester who dismissed her colorful patterns as “too extreme.” She didn’t listen.

She is just as resilient today as she was then: “In fashion, you go up and you go down, and my hope is that I can keep swimming along. You have to find a way to keep going — that’s the main thing.”

Nothdruft, who also edited the book that accompanies the show “Zandra Rhodes: 50 Fabulous Years in Fashion” (Yale Books), put it another way. He said fashion years are like dog years, “so a 50-year career might as well be 350 years. And there are not a lot of designers who are still around,” to celebrate that.