The brand’s factory, it transpires, was situated next to the Fashion Textile Museum, which Rhodes founded, from 2000 to 2011. The accessories giant upscaled to larger premises in Clerkenwell three years ago, but Rhodes is still fond of its footwear. “What is so clever is that they put themselves into a very modern bracket,” she says of Kurt Geiger's appeal. “There’s a real diversity to the shoe styles.”
The campaign is a riotous line-up of British characters. Dame Joan Collins, Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, artist Christabel MacGreevy and models Alice Dellal, Alek Wek and Reece King all star alongside Rhodes. “I think diversity in a campaign is very important now because the world you're selling to is more and more diverse,” she asserts. “Brands need to look at the bigger picture.”
With her bubblegum-pink, razor-sharp bob (the result of experimenting with textile dyes in her studio many moons ago) and patterned get-up (an archive piece from her Fantastic Flower Garden SS88 collection), the 78-year-old dame quite literally pops against the blank canvas, which was chosen to let each individual’s style do the talking. “As a designer, I suppose my job is to stick my neck out and think of things in a different way,” she explains of her loud and proud personal brand identity. “I think most people get confidence from being able to link back to something.”
On the shoot, Kurt Geiger's motley crew sat outside the studio and put the world to rights while awaiting their turn in front of Erik Torstensson's camera. “Oh my gosh, how the fashion industry has changed,” she shares. “It moves almost quicker than we're able to breathe!” When Rhodes started out in 1969 there was no internet – “there wasn’t even fax, you had to telephone or visit everyone!” – and she admits she’s still not 100 per cent social-media savvy. “The young people working for me absorb all that because they get it,” she notes. “I've always found that I have to go into myself when designing. I don't always want to see what everyone else is doing because it takes a distinctive edge off what I try to achieve.”
She concedes that she probably should have become au fait with digital marketing sooner, but her career highlights are categorically offline. Receiving her copy of British Vogue in 1975 and finding Princess Anne wearing one of her designs in a Norman Parkinson shoot, and watching Princess Diana wearing a Zandra Rhodes dress when she announced her pregnancy in Japan, are both up there in the Rhodes hall of fame. “I told them all about my adventures in frocks!” she laughs of the shoot.
As her brand is about to turn 50 next year (there’s a book and an exhibition in the pipeline), there's lots of wisdom for her to impart on the younger generation. “You have to think around the challenges,” she muses. “Coming up with designs is challenging, but I was the first designer to do a cowboy collection in 1975, before anyone else even thought about cowboys! I'm so lucky that I've been surrounded by these ideas.”
Kurt Geiger’s decision to enlist a blockbuster cast after sitting out the last campaign season is part of its expansion strategy, which will see it open 100 doors in the US this autumn, in addition to Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. Rhodes is thrilled to represent this global customer, and is humble about the fact her own brand still has global appeal, but she goes back to the importance of nurturing brand identities as well as personal ones. “I don't know what will happen, I suppose we might go into overload,” she says of the pace of the fashion industry. “After social media, there will be another layer of something else, but we don’t know what that's going to be.” As long as we have characters like Rhodes to keep the online and offline landscape colourful, it won’t be dull.
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