Zandra Rhodes

Rhodes trained as a textile designer, not a dressmaker, and I think that fact explains almost everything distinctive about her work - the print always comes first. She'd design the fabric itself, hand-painting or screen-printing bold, often jagged motifs directly onto silk chiffon before a single seam was cut, which means the garment ends up built around the textile rather than the textile being chosen to fill a pre-decided silhouette. That's backwards from how most fashion houses work, and it shows in how singular her pieces from this decade still look.

The moment she's most remembered for is her 1977 "Conceptual Chic" collection, and it's a genuinely important pivot point in fashion history, not just a good show. London's punk scene had already been generating its own visual language on the street and in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop through 1976 and into 1977 - safety pins, deliberately torn fabric, chains - as a real rejection of fashion's whole premise, discussed more in the punk rock and anti-fashion entry. Rhodes took those same elements - rips, safety pins, chain embellishment - and rebuilt them in silk chiffon and jersey, sometimes worked through with beading and her own hand-done prints, and put them on a couture runway. It reads almost paradoxical: taking a scene built explicitly on rejecting expensive, "proper" fashion and rendering it in exactly that register. But that tension is the whole point of the collection's significance - it's one of the clearest, earliest documented moments of a street subculture's visual vocabulary crossing directly into high fashion, before "punk" was a marketing category anyone reached for casually.

She was working in bright, saturated color and metallic accenting well before that collection too - her prints often used lurex and metallic thread work for shimmer against the flat matte of dyed silk, which is part of why her clothes photographed so distinctively against the era's more muted boho palette. I think what makes her a genuinely important 70s figure, beyond any single collection, is that she never really stopped being a textile artist who happened to also cut clothes - the dress was always secondary to what was printed on it, and that's a rarer priority in fashion than it sounds.