London’s modern classic

Financial Times (February 22 2008)

Peacocks and Pinstripes is the first exhibition to fill the newly developed Fashion and Textile Museum since its re-opening earlier this month. The museum, originally launched by British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes in spring 2003, has now been taken over by Newham College of Further Education, which intends to expand its remit with an academy. The college has championed off-site education programmes in the past, teaming up with Savile Row’s master tailors to offer apprenticeships, an idea they hope to expand into other sectors at the museum’s academy.

The current exhibition, a collaboration with Getty Images, celebrates the museum’s re-opening with a gentlemanly tip of the hat. “The idea for Peacocks and Pinstripes was to do something that people hadn’t thought about or wouldn’t normally see,” explains the museum’s curator Dennis Nothdruft. “It takes men from behind the camera and, instead, looks at them in front of the camera.” The show is organised in themes, such as “smart casual”, “tailoring” and “contemporary”, and sees Teddy boys and cobblers framed alongside a suited Michael Caine or a ruffled-looking Lucian Freud, captured mid-cigarette.

The exhibition marks a change from the tactile shows overseen by the more theatrical Rhodes. These will, however, apparently return, as she is proud to tell me when we meet in her cluttered studio above the museum one Saturday morning.

“The head of Newham College, Martin Tolhurst, has been very explicit about wanting me involved,” she says proudly. “I have been able to donate items from my archive to the college, which is wonderful as it keeps my work alive and also gives something to the students.”
Rhodes is instantly welcoming, and with her iconic pink bob, indigo eye make-up and silver-threaded chiffon dress, I can see why she causes a stir wherever she goes – and why Newham College is so keen to keep her involved.

Once she had been introduced to fashion by her mother, a teacher at Medway College of Art in Kent, it was the world of textile design that attracted Rhodes. In the mid-1960s she started supplying the designers on Swinging London’s Carnaby Street, with her pop-art textile prints and soon opened her first clothes shop on Fulham Road. It was her first collection in 1967 that caught the attention of the then editor-in-chief of American Vogue and arbiter of style Diana Vreeland, and made her one to watch in the industry.

“I have saved all of those early collections, in fact the initial reason I wanted to open a museum was to try to preserve and catalogue my designs. I had a factory in Hammersmith, a small studio in Bayswater, a house in Notting hill and screens in storage – bits everywhere,” she waves.
“I was trying to reduce the size of it all when two friends of mine, Andrew Logan [who designed the oversized museum brooch Rhodes is proudly wearing] and Michael Davis [who heads the local Bermondsey Street Association], saw this wonderful warehouse going. It was huge and grey, but big enough to combine it all – and to hold a museum. So I bought it, converted it in 2000 and the museum officially opened in 2003.”

The distinctive building soon contained her printing room, sewing studio, office, flat, museum and all of her collections. “I opened the museum and suddenly I’d be getting all these phone calls and people were interested in my work for the first time in years. It was like being a Beatle again!” she grins. “There was a huge resurgence of interest in my work.”

The museum has concentrated on archiving and cataloguing textile designs from the outset. “Our collections start in 1947, so we are a contemporary museum,” explains Nothdruft. “We will never compete with the Victoria and Albert Museum, and we wouldn’t want too – we couldn’t. The problem with a lot of museums is that the general public don’t get to see their archives and we want to show ours.”

Although the museum was well received by local residents and had support from Newham College from the outset, the financial pressures of funding exhibitions and maintaining a sizeable building soon snowballed. When Newham agreed to take the museum over, Rhodes could not have been more thankful. “It would have been heartbreaking to see the museum close, so it is amazing the college has managed to keep it open and they have consulted me all the way along,” she says.

The revamped museum continues to celebrate the Rhodes name with a permanent collection of her designs on show. The current display – chosen, she says, to celebrate the Chinese new year – features outfits from her 1980s Chinese collection. The mannequins, donated by the estate of famed mannequin-maker Adele Rootstein, will be re-dressed to coincide with the changing of the museum’s lead exhibitions. This will allow Rhodes’s archives to be aired in rotation – though with 88 trunks in her storage rooms, it will take a long time to get through them all.

The museum is picking up its pace at the moment, with a restocked shop, a new café and a schedule of exhibitions and events covering everything from trilbys and a celebration of the little black dress to talks by Rhodes. “They want me to be their ambassador too,” she sighs. “Isn’t that something wonderful?” ‘Peacocks and Pinstripes’ continues until May 31, www.ftmlondon.org