Still in the pink – Zandra camps it up

The walking, talking, living embodiment of her own vision, she has always worn the most bold of her own creations, complemented by her supernaturally radiant hair. "It takes courage to go to the supermarket looking like I do," she once said. Zandra Rhodes is no shrinking violet and, as she approaches her 70th birthday, she remains an instantly recognisable icon of British culture.

Her client list ranges from the late Princess Diana, Jackie Onassis and Zsa Zsa Gabor to current fashionistas Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Kylie Minogue. Princess Anne managed to look divine in a heavenly long white lace dress Zandra designed for her engagement photograph. But it is Zandra herself who shows off all that is best about her exuberant, unignorable, unapologetically flamboyant designs.

"I'm going to wear a glittering bell-bottom trouser suit with chiffon jacket and more glittering jewellery," she says of the evening ensemble she has chosen for her visit to Huddersfield University where, as a guest of the Huddersfield Textile Society, she is to deliver a lecture entitled A Lifelong Love Affair with Textiles. The society's president, Bill Skidmore, picked her up from her London home at 8am that morning to motor her to the venue himself, so eager was he that she meet this year's crop of talented Huddersfield students, plus members of Yorkshire's textile industry.

"I haven't spent enough time up here," says Zandra, although she knows the county fairly well, having stored until recently part of her clothing collection with Sir Tatton Sykes at Sledmere House in East Yorkshire, and also paying visits to her friend David Hockney in Bridlington.

The association with Hockney goes back to her college days. He was a student two years ahead of her at the Royal College of Art and his painting The Generals provided the inspiration for her degree collection of fabrics printed with medals – Heals bought a design.

"I didn't know him then," she says. "I just admired his work. I really got to know him later in Los Angeles."

California is now home for Zandra, at least part of the time, as she commutes between the UK and San Diego, where she lives with her husband Salah Hassanein, who was the president of Warner Brothers' theatre division, developing the concept for the Vue multiplex cinemas. Now in his late 80s, he spends much time on charity work, assisted by Zandra. "I think you have to try and give something back," she says.

Does this dual home, jet-setting life suit her? "I'm not sure it suits me; it's the way life happens and you adapt," she says simply. This ability to adapt, to distil an essential simplicity from life

and all its wonders and complications, sums up Zandra Rhodes well.

She is Zandra with a Z, not a Sandra deliberately altered to evoke exoticism. As a child she constantly had to explain the spelling.

Born in 1940 in Chatham, Kent, her father was a lorry driver, while her mother, Beatrice, had been a fitter at the fashion house Worth in Paris and had a silver curl on top of her head that she sprayed silver.

She was a teacher at Medway College of Art, where young Zandra studied before transferring to the Royal College of Art in London to study textile design, after which she set up a shop with designer Sylvia Ayton on Fulham Road. Sadly Beatrice died of lung cancer before seeing her daughter establish herself.

Going it alone, in 1969 Zandra took her collection to New York, where it was featured in American Vogue, and her long association with the US began, although she never cut links with the UK and was one of a new wave of designers who put London at the head of the international fashion scene in the seventies. She began her own shop with backers including Vanessa Redgrave, while a young Janet Street Porter modelled for her. She carried a sketch book around with her everywhere, as she does to this day, and shaved off her eyebrows to look more startling. Anything and everything inspired her, from beauty advertisements to nature.

"A lot of my designs come from travel and seeing things that draw you to them, like I've just seen a beautiful derelict building, or the shapes of trees – you never know where it will lead," she says.

With Zandra's work, it's all about the fabric – this, after all, is why she is in Huddersfield. She has always seen herself first and foremost as a textile designer, rather than a fashion designer; understand this and her clothes immediately make sense.

Using the world around her as she sees it, she starts with an idea, which becomes pattern and colour, experimented with, refined, simplified, and this printed pattern is what determines the shape and style of the garment.

Ideas and patterns are never ceased, but are recycled, reinterpreted, developed over years. Unusually, she has kept a sample of every design she has ever made, now catalogued in the Fashion and Textile Museum she has created in Bermondsey, South London, in a building that also houses her design studio and, right at the top, her own London home.

"Textile designers are the Cinderellas of the fashion world," she says. "If you think about a Chanel suit, really, that suit is fully designed and it's the weave of the fabric that makes it what it is. But the designer who designed that is invisible – and I know a lot of it is done in the North of England.

"I think this country has always been one of the leaders in design and experimenting and I just hope it's allowed to stay that way," she says, adding that she is concerned about the increasing number of students going into fashion design and management, rather than manufacturing.

"If you don't have the people who do the practical stuff, there's no point in doing the designing."

She sees no easy revival for British textile industry: "I don't think in our lifetime, as we know it, as everything has switched to China."

But when she first began designing fabrics, many traditional British manufacturers found them too extreme – "yet I could imagine how they could look made up into garments." So necessity forced her to become a fashion designer.

Like Hockney, Zandra Rhodes will forever be associated with colour and light – the bold, splashy, surrealistically bright colour of sunshine, heat and exoticism. "People tend to be very frightened of colour," she says. "I was on a plane back to California and I realised that everyone was in black, and there I was in yellow trousers, with pink hair and a print T-shirt. Usually I don't think about it. I just get dressed in the morning. It makes no difference to what I do."

Indeed, Zandra has always ploughed her own colourful furrow, oblivious to popular trends.The birth of minimalism at the start of the 1990s caused a hiccup and Zandra closed her London shop, workshop and factory, but by the end of the decade, Liberty had reintroduced a

capsule collection and designers such as John Galliano openly referenced her work.

Now Zandra is creating faster than ever. Again, like Hockney, she has branched into designing for opera (she created costumes for the ENO's production of Aida). As well as her own collections, she recently collaborated with Marks & Spencer, and now has come up with a camping range for outdoors specialists Millets, reckoning, quite reasonably, that the recession and its aftermath will continue to create demand for simple at-home holidays and festival-going, and that people will want exciting teepees, sleeping bags and wellies to cheer them up.

Because, somewhat improbably, Zandra Rhodes loves camping.

"Some years ago, my husband and I went white water rafting down the Grand Canyon and we camped on the banks of the Colorado River," she says.

The inspiration for the designs comes from Native Americans, as she admires the qualities they value – "such as patience, a regard for nature and a respect for people's individuality".

Decades of achievement

1940 – Born Chatham, Kent.

1961-1964 – Studied at Royal College of Art, School of Textile and Design.

1967 – opened first shop on Fulham Road in London.

1972 – Named Designer of the Year.

1974 – Made Royal Designer for Industry.

1995 – Hall of Fame Award awarded by the British Fashion Council.

1995 – Established her own studio in California in order to develop her ideas on interior design.

1997 – Made Commander of the British Empire.

1998 September – Took part in "British Invasion" at Saks Fifth Avenue, New York.

1998 December Created pink- haired fairy on the Christmas tree at Buckingham Palace, later auctioned for charity.

2003 May – Opening of the Fashion and Textile Museum, a project Zandra had been working on for eight years.