For all her resurgent popularity, Rhodes has not lounged on the sideline, letting others cash in on her past hits. A gypsy in more ways than one, she shuttles between her studio and home near San Diego (she lives with Salah Hassanein, a retired Warner Brothers executive) and London, where she also has an apartment and work space. Last year she showed a runway collection, her first in 20 years.
In 2003 she opened the Fashion and Textile Museum, a hot-pink and orange rectangle in South London that houses her archive as well as the works of her own fashion heroes, including Giorgio Armani, Issey Miyake and Thierry Mugler, and those of influential textile designers. "The textile people never seem to get enough credit," said Rhodes, who began her career designing fabrics. Today the museum, disparaged at first as a vanity project, is part of Newham College of Further Education, housing textile and fashion designs from the 1950s onward.
In New York she still turns heads. "Looking at me, people think, 'Oh, she must be somebody.'" They do indeed, sometimes addressing her as Ms. Johnson (as in Betsey) or Ms. Westwood (as in Vivienne), madcaps who have likewise sustained famously long-running careers. "I don't correct them," she said with a shrug.
Her own trajectory, which peaked in the mid-1980s, hit something of a low point in 2000, when Rhodes was issued a standing room ticket to a Matthew Williamson fashion show. Even the ticket-taker, a fellow Londoner, did not recognize her.
But then, Rhodes has never lived for the spotlight, having mostly sidestepped the London club scene of her high-profile contemporaries, designers like Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell. "I tended to end up working," she said.
She rises before dawn to send faxes around the world, then withdraws to her studio. Her stringent work ethic leaves little room for frivolity. She has said she sleeps in her makeup, because, "to put it on every day would simply take too much time." Her nails, lacquered in a searing pink, were peeling at the edges.
"When I'm busy I find they get chipped," she said. "But I'm learning to move my hands quickly, so you won't see."
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