10. Reinterpreting the 'Shell Spiral' jacket
Zandra Rhodes is famous for using her textile print designs to inform the shape of the final garment. The shape of the quilted satin jacket in this video was first developed in 1973 from a print of a spiral of shells.
Zandra Rhodes started this print with the idea in the back of her mind that she would cut around the diminishing spiral and end up with a snakelike shape. But as she states, when she tried doing this, the results "were hopeless". She then tried experimenting with printing the 'Shell Spiral' design on different fabrics and eventually came up with the quilted satin jacket, which uses the whole of the print design and follows its curved shape.
This jacket was reworked in her Autumn/Winter 2012 collection using a completely different print, giving it a whole new look. In her digitised archive, another example of the jacket can be seen from her 1985 India Revisited collection, which was made in black satin and hand beaded and satin stitched in gold.