“Zandra Rhodes is yer authentic young English eccentric.” That’s how WWD began a profile of the designer on Aug. 27, 1969. The statement continues to stick — even as Rhodes traded a “head swathed in turbans” for today’s trademark hot pink bob. At the time of the interview, Rhodes was one of a number of hot London names, including Ossie Clark and Janice Wainwright, to spring out of the Royal College of Art. Her calling card: a keen eye for daring and outrageous prints. “Zandra sees everything — face, clothes, environment — in simple terms as surface to be decorated,” wrote our London correspondent. “And she decorates it by scrapping every previous idea of how to go about it — instead, taking what people think of as intrinsically bad or too ordinary to notice, and using these things to create something else that has no relation to the original object at all.” Cases in point: “the lipsticks she sent slithering across pale blue satin” and “the teddy bears that danced across canvas and suede.” Rhodes, sporting “a dozen five & dime store rings on her fingers,” didn’t shy away from the overexposed — “You can use a shape that’s been used so many times before it’s a bit corny,” she said, “but if you use it in all kinds of new ways, it becomes something new” — or the unsightly. “I like very big, splashy, badly drawn patterns,” she explained, “but they must look consciously badly drawn, like a lot of Twenties things looked badly drawn in a funny kind of way.” She added of that off-kilter ethos: “People used to laugh at my things — so I had to work out my own designs to prove my prints could actually be used in clothes.”