Dress

This brightly hued dress hails from British designer Zandra Rhodes’s “Lily” collection for autumn/winter 1972–73. Rhodes initially trained as a textile designer at the Royal College of Art in London. Similar to the early twentieth-century artist Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, she first ventured into fashion to find a suitable canvas to display her distinctive printed textile designs.

From the outset, Rhodes’s methodology has been to allow the fabric and pattern composition to dictate the structure of the garment. This dress, among her most popular and enduring silhouettes, combines the prints “Field of Lilies” and “Reverse Lily” across a flowing expanse of silk chiffon. Although Rhodes has always hand-sketched her designs, this was the first collection that incorporated calligraphic and textual elements into the layout. Sprinkled amid stylized blossoms and blades of grass, phrases like “Zandra’s beautiful Lilies” and “leaves, more leaves, green, a leaf,” fill floral voids and line the perimeter of stems, whimsically blurring the distinction between aesthetic and textual functions.