Zandra Rhodes: the legendary fashion designer on ageing uncompromisingly

I can’t be cool about today’s guest, so I’m not even going to try. Ever since I started The Shift I have had a Wishlist and high up on it from day one was Dame Zandra Rhodes.

Yes, that Zandra Rhodes. There can only be one after all.

For over 50 years, Zandra has been a leading figure in the British fashion industry, renowned for her prints and her use of colour.

Over the years she has dressed everyone from Princesses Diana to Freddie Mercury, Diana Ross and Debbie Harry, and collaborated with everyone from M&S to Ikea. Zandra is nothing if not egalitarian.

Now 83 (and in remission from the terminal cancer she was diagnosed with at the start of covid), she has no plans to stop any time soon, as evidenced by her new book Iconic, My Life in Fashion in 50 Objects, a whistle-stop tour through her incredible life hanging out with ossie clark, lunching with Truman Capote, making a lifelong friend of legendary vogue editor Diana Vreeland.

Which is how I get to be on my way to Bermondsey to hang out at her fabulous flat to talk about her equally fabulous life. I know!

Zandra and I sat down with a cuppa to discuss how a “boring little girl” became synonymous with big, bold, uncompromising style, her lifelong workaholism, living a child-free life, using clothes as armour and the rejection that was the making of her... 

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Iconic: My Life in Fashion in 50 Objects by Zandra Rhodes and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

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