Zandra Rhodes: Zandra's show home

Zandra Rhodes is known as one of Britain's most flamboyant designers. But tomorrow she unveils her boldest creation yet: a museum of fashion. Naturally, writes Susannah Frankel, it's as idiosyncratic as the grande dame herself, who lives on the top floor

I first encountered Zandra Rhodes when, 10 years ago now, I moved into a flat two doors down from her then home. She lived in a crumbling west- London mansion, painted pastel pink, and dense with exotic foliage. In the window was a huge round dinner table lit by an Andrew Logan chandelier the size of a spaceship. It put the rest of the well-mannered white-stucco Victorian street to shame. And then there was the lady's driving. Tearing round the corner in her battered old Mini, threatening to take out anything in her path, Rhodes would screech to a halt outside her house, parking, obliviously, at right angles to the curb. At this point, anyone in the immediate vicinity would stop in their tracks to gawp. They weren't disappointed when the designer emerged. A small woman draped in rainbow-coloured fabric, accessorised with clattering brooches, a fuchsia topknot and crazed kabuki-esque make-up, she looked like the most glamorous bag-lady in the world. She was pure theatre, then as now.

It seems apposite, then, that the Zandra Rhodes Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, where she lives and works today, also sticks out like a sore thumb. For all the talk of that area's regeneration, it remains, for the most part, dilapidated if not plain grey. Not so Rhodes's latest project, which opens its doors to an unsuspecting public next week. It throbs with colour in a manner not usually associated with the British capital. Designed by Ricardo Legorreta, the Mexican architect, the façade is burnt-orange, plum and rose. The entrance-hall floor boasts a jewellery box of a mosaic – a starburst of glass, marble and semi-precious stones. Inside the gallery itself, more densely glowing shades are in evidence, from lapis to marigold.

It is Rhodes herself, however, who is destined to be the gallery's brightest exhibit. Today, she lives in relative splendour on the top floor: that Andrew Logan chandelier is there, too, sparkling prettily in the sunshine, scattering light across the walls.

"The original idea came to me because I'd saved all these clothes and was shifting them around from one place to the other," she says. "I was going to give them to the Victoria & Albert Museum and I realised – although it's my favourite museum in the whole world – that it's so big, you'd hardly ever see them. Then this building came up."

She approached the Charity Commission, which said that it couldn't endorse a gallery dedicated solely to her own work but that it might be interested in a more far-reaching British fashion museum. "Then things started snowballing, and I realised that I'd stumbled on something really obvious: that there isn't a museum like that in this country, and it was in need of being done."

If that sounds simple enough, the process has at times proved quite painful, even for a woman whose work ethic decrees that she should labour seven days a week, 14 hours a day. While still designing twice-yearly collections as well as one-off pieces, Rhodes spends half of her time in California with her "boyfriend and sort-of tycoon, I suppose", the former Warner Bros president Salah Hassanein. On both sides of the Atlantic, she has hosted fundraising events, and scrimped and saved until her brainchild has become the exuberant reality it is today.

Rhodes was born in Chatham, Kent, in 1940. Her father was a lorry driver at the local dockyards. Her mother worked for the house of Worth in Paris before she married, at which point she set up shop as a dressmaker, designing under the quaint moniker Beatrice Modes. At the same time she taught at the local art college. "She was always on her sewing-machine; she fitted clients at home. I used to model in her college fashion-shows, wearing pretty hats and little off-the-shoulder dresses. I must have been about eight or nine," remembers Zandra. Even at this tender age, she stood out. "I didn't used to look like all the other kids. They used to make fun of me. When I went through the park, I'd have to run."

After school, spurred on by her mother, Rhodes went to Medway College of Art. From there she earnt a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London to study textiles, during the dawning of the Pop Art movement. David Hockney was in his final year when Rhodes started. His painting, Generals, inspired her degree collection of fabrics printed with medals. Heal's bought one of her first designs and Queen magazine used another for a cover.

"Oh, it was a wonderful time. I graduated in 1962 with a first-class honours degree. I had a teaching job lined up at Ravensbourne in Kent, and my boyfriend and I had just enough money to rent a room. So I did part-time teaching and started to sell my work."

The designer had, of course, long since shaken off any early tendencies towards being a shrinking violet – far from sprinting through the park to escape attention, by the time she left college, she courted it. "It takes courage to go to the supermarket looking like I do," she once said. Over the next 20 years, her hair would travel the spectrum from inky blue, through acid green and purple before settling on pink. She also had her eyebrows removed ("I didn't need them any more"), then painted them back on again as an undulating line. "I use myself as a canvas," was her mantra at that time.

During the Seventies, Zandra Rhodes dresses, in rainbow colours, hand-painted, beaded and embroidered, were worn by Bianca Jagger, Tina Chow, Natalie Wood, Liza Minnelli and Jackie Onassis. She infiltrated the Establishment, too. Princess Anne wore Zandra Rhodes for her official engagement photograph, and Princess Margaret wore one of her designs for her 60th birthday. Rhodes, who describes herself as a patriot, once returned the compliment, proclaiming that if she had to find fault with the Queen, "I'd say she doesn't dress up enough. She should be seen in her crown at all times, whatever she's doing."

The birth of minimalism in the early Nineties rendered the designer's maximal aesthetic off-kilter. The recession hit and she was forced to close her London shop, her workshop in Bayswater, and her factory in Olympia. It wasn't until the end of that decade that a revival was born: Liberty reintroduced a capsule collection, and designers from John Galliano to Christian Lacroix openly referenced her work. Later, Milan's most fashionable boutique, 10 Corso Como, bought Zandra Rhodes, so did Koh Samui in London. And, all the while, her museum was slowly but surely taking shape, too.

"The thing is, if you're Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein, whom I greatly respect, you don't have to run true to a style, do you?" she says. "You can't be caught out. In just the same way, if there's one designer I really respect it's Thierry Mugler. I could spot a Mugler suit from the length of that road, and it's always got the right attention to detail. It doesn't mean it's always good, because you can go in and out of fashion, but you know what his contribution is."

She could, of course, equally be talking about her own work and, perhaps for this reason, her business remains, in the great tradition of British fashion designers, a cottage industry concern. Despite her profile, Rhodes continues to struggle to make ends meet. She should be proud of herself, none the less. "The advantage of being a woman," she says, "is that once you're past 65, you can be a dowager empress." At the grand old age of 63, she is clearly well on her way.

The Fashion and Textile Museum, 83 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 (020-7403 0222), opens to the public 12 May