T Unseen reasures
To celebrate the Fashion and Textile Museum’s 10th anniversary, founder and iconic British designer Zandra Rhodes unveils her latest exhibition Unseen. Hayley Leaver investigates….
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upported by Newham College of Further Education, the Fashion and Textile Museum celebrates its 10th anniversary this year with a dynamic
programme of events and exhibitions, and founder Zandra Rhodes’ Unseen leads the way. Honouring the fashion designer’s 50 years in the industry, the exhibition is a rare opportunity to explore the creativity of one of the fashion world’s most dynamic personalities. Head of the Fashion and Textile Museum, Celia Joicey says: “Zandra Rhodes: Unseen is one of the highlights of the Museum’s 10th anniversary. Zandra’s extraordinary imagination and sense of colour is instantly recognisable across 50 years of work. T is exhibition reveals why she is an inspiration to young designers as well as to her contemporaries.” “It’s a celebration of the museum being open for 10 years,” Zandra Rhodes tells Waterfront. “A celebration of my work that has been stored for all of this time and was unseen to the world or unpublicised. I hope visitors will take away insider knowledge
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about me that perhaps they did not know before. T ings they will not expect or know about what Zandra Rhodes does and how many dimensions there are to my work.” Known for her experimentation with colour,
print and fabric, as well as with her own image, this exhibition highlights the full scope of Rhodes’ artistic vision and archive, including sketches, designs and garments only seen before in her 1980’s fashion shows. While known for dressing the likes of Diana,
Princess of Wales, Elizabeth Taylor and Kylie Minogue, Rhodes’ early prints were actually considered too outrageous by traditional British manufacturers and her pioneering role in textile design is also on display here. “My designs are recognisably my own and no
one else’s,” she says, “because my fashions are totally infl uenced by the shapes of my textile prints, which was a totally new concept that I developed in 1969 in my fi rst collection.” Curator of the Fashion and Textile Museum, Dennis Nothdruft says: “Arguably, Zandra is the best representative of a generation of
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