The Zandra Rhodes Foundation was established by Dame Zandra Rhodes in 2020 to cultivate the study of her life, work, techniques and designs and their combined contributions to culture. Rhodes’ wish is to inspire current and future generations of designers, artists, researchers, students and educators, amateur and professional, by providing access to her 56 year-and-ongoing body of output and methodology – possibly the last, great, physical, textile-practice archive created before the move into the realms of the digital.
“I formed the Zandra Rhodes Foundation when I realised that my vast collection of original garments, drawings and printed textile lengths were sitting in storage, unseen by anyone beyond my studio team. Looking back and cataloguing my life’s work has been a truly wonderful experience. The Foundation’s archive holds my physical, hands-on creative process, developed before the age of the computer! It is my sincere wish for my work to live on through the fabulous imagination of future generations as it is made available to them as an in-depth learning resource.”
– Dame Zandra Rhodes
Rhodes’ vast archive is currently being catalogued. A central collection will stay with the Foundation and the remaining material will be donated to the permanent collections of major museums across the world, including the Fashion and Textile Museum, London, which Zandra founded in 2003, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rhodes is working with Project Director Piers Atkinson and a team of archivists, cataloguing her lifetimes’ output. Dating from the late 1960s to the current day, the Foundation’s archive consists of over 6,000 garments, printed textiles, accessories, drawings, fashion films, kodatraces, silk screens, press cuttings and a personal collection of memorabilia and collected artworks.
The Foundation is proud to have partnerships with leading universities in the UK and America. De Monfort University in Leicester holds Rhodes’ working archive of press cuttings, licences and opera designs. The University for the Creative Arts is continuing to build on its digital library of over 500 photographed garments, accessories and fashion design drawings and the FIT in New York holds films of Zandra Rhodes’ fashion show extravaganzas.
The garment and design archive resides in Rhodes’ studio in Bermondsey, London.
The Zandra Rhodes Foundation 