The Zandra Rhodes Pieces That Belong in Your Closet (or a Museum), Per Lilah
Plus, more vintage shopping and culture recommendations for the week.
This week’s recommendations: As Dame Zandra Rhodes readies 92 lots from her archive for auction on June 17 at Kerry Taylor, I’ve gathered a selection of vintage finds that channel her singular brand of bohemian glamour. Meanwhile, American Ballet Theatre prepares to bid farewell to one of its greats: Gillian Murphy will take her final bow as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake this July, closing a nearly 30-year chapter with exquisite grace. And The Frick’s newly opened café, Westmoreland, serves its scones and poached trout with a generous side of Gilded Age splendor.
You Should Really Buy This: Zandra Rhodes Edition
British fashion’s reigning queen of color and chiffon, Dame Zandra Rhodes, is flinging open the trunks of her archive—92 lots of it—in a landmark auction at Kerry Taylor on June 17.
Though the bidding won’t start for a few more days, there’s no need to wait to channel Zandra’s magic as I’ve pulled pieces you can shop now. I’m focusing on her 1970s-era designs—her most sun-soaked and spellbinding work, if you ask me. Rhodes (who is this week’s You Really Should Know This) took the free-spirited hippie culture of the ’60s and spun it into something softer, more romantic, and unapologetically high fashion. These were clothes for the dreamers with trust funds, for art girls who summered in St. Tropez, for anyone who thought a caftan was a lifestyle.
All the cool girls should be floating through this summer’s weddings and garden parties in one-of-a-kind pieces like these. Boho-chic, before it ever knew its name.
A Rhodes Rarity
A bona fide museum piece! This radiant yellow wool coat hails from Zandra Rhodes’s debut 1969 collection, The Knitted Circle, and resides in the permanent collections of The Met, V&A, LACMA, and RISD. Adorned with a trompe l’oeil print mimicking knit stitches and scattered with Rhodes’s iconic 'diamond and roses' motif, the coat stuns with balloon sleeves, a curling collar with tasseled cords, and a sweeping, full-circle skirt made for cinematic twirls. If ever there were a garment to make even a museum curator swoon, this is it.
Gossamer Galliano
This blush-toned Dior slip from Fall 2005 is Galliano at his most wearable and romantic. All floaty chiffon and delicate sequin embroidery, it captures the lingerie-as-daywear mood that feels just right for summer—bare shoulders, golden light, and nothing too serious. A near match to Look 28 on the runway, it’s from the era when Galliano softened his vision for Dior into something light, louche, and impossibly pretty. The boudoir goes outdoors.
Picture-Perfect Prada
The ultimate skirt for exploring Europe—preferably with a paperback guidebook and a gelato in hand. This illustrated A-line from Prada’s Spring 2004 collection captures Miuccia’s take on nostalgic femininity, inspired by vintage tourism wardrobes but smartened up with intellectual wit. Worn by Daria Werbowy as the show’s opening look, it nods to fifties travel glamour with hand-drawn landmarks and a just-quirky-enough hem. A collectible from Prada’s golden age of chic, subversive souvenirs.
Cavalli Crush
Look 57 from Cavalli’s Spring 2002 show, this embroidered slip dress is a masterclass in sultry, over-the-top romance. With floral silk, peekaboo mesh, and baroque appliqué, it channels the designer’s “modern fairy tale” vision in full force. It’s also, incidentally, the perfect summer wedding guest dress—equal parts ethereal and daring, with just enough drama to hold its own against the bouquet toss. For those who RSVP yes to glamour.
More Vintage Finds—No Context Needed
You Really Should Try This: Westmoreland at The Frick
Yes, everyone has seen the “New Frick.” But have they dined in it?
The museum’s freshly unveiled café, Westmoreland, is reason enough for a return visit. Tucked on the second floor of the Annabelle Selldorf-renovated mansion, the space is as transportive as any Fragonard in the collection. Think: mohair green settees, pink floors, red bamboo chairs, and biomorphic medallions blooming across the ceiling. A mural here, a garden view there—everything just shy of a still life.
Named after the Frick family’s Pullman car, Westmoreland serves poached trout and caramelized onion scones in rooms that whisper of Gilded Age glamour and painterly detail. This isn’t just a café—it’s a mise-en-scène.
You Really Should Know This: Zandra Rhodes
To call Dame Zandra Rhodes a designer is to undersell her. She’s a maximalist, a monument, a national treasure swathed in chiffon. With her shocking pink hair, painted face, and penchant for pearls the size of plums, she’s been a walking manifesto of wearable art since the late 1960s.
Born in Chatham, Kent, in 1940 to a couturier mother and lorry-driver father, Rhodes was raised on sewing patterns and hard work. She studied textile design at Medway College of Art and then the Royal College of Art, graduating with first-class honors and dreams of furnishing the world. When interior firms found her prints too avant-garde, she stitched them into clothes instead.
In 1969, she launched her first solo collection, catching the eye of American Vogue and buyers at Saks and Neiman Marcus. Soon her eccentric, screen-printed dresses were worn by Princess Anne (for her engagement portrait), Natalie Wood (in Vogue), Diana Ross, and Freddie Mercury, whose white pleated stage blouse was originally part of a Zandra wedding ensemble.
In 1977, Rhodes coined “Conceptual Chic”—her punk-influenced collection of silk gowns artfully slashed and held together with beaded safety pins, a full decade before Versace. Her work has always been about contradiction: theatrical yet technical, bohemian yet architectural, delicate yet defiant.
Her life, too, has been marked by reinvention. In 2003 she opened the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, living in a riotously colorful penthouse atop the pink-and-orange building designed by Ricardo Legorreta. Over the years, she’s designed opera costumes, London Transport posters, and even a frilled pink Ikea bag.
Despite losing her longtime partner Salah Hassanein in 2019 and being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 2020, Rhodes—now 84—is still working. “If I’ve got my hair and makeup on, it makes me face the day,” she told The Guardian. Her vast archive of over 15,000 garments—her “butterflies,” as she calls them—is currently being catalogued for museum donation and public sale.
This summer, she opens the first auction from her archive, including pieces worn by Princess Diana. For Zandra, legacy is an art form—and one best rendered in technicolor.
You Really Should See This: Gillian Murphy’s Final Bow
New Yorkers, take note: on July 18, the curtain will rise—and fall—for the final time on Gillian Murphy, the American Ballet Theatre principal whose dancing has long defied gravity and time. She’ll perform Swan Lake at the Met, her swan song quite literally, as Odette/Odile. A post-show toast awaits, but the real celebration will be onstage: a final flutter of silk, strength, and artistry. One night. One legend. One last bow.