Fab! Great colours and zany design.
Heals purchased this design Top Brass from Zandra Rhodes' first year degree show at the Royal College of Art in 1964. The design epitomises the swinging sixties when colourful military ackets were in vogue. Rhodes chose medals as her theme, a popular one with the Beatles for the Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band record. Top Brass was one of a group of four prints produced. Why do none of the others come on the market one wonders. This design was influenced by a painting of third year student David Hockney, in particular Hockney's A Grand Procession of Dignatories 1961. Hockney's painting shows little medal like shapes along the border. "From the way the picutre was created it was the medals that first caught my eye" said Rhodes. She sketched medals at the Wellington and Imperial War Museums in preparation for the design.
Rhodes went on to establish her own design label and the Fashion Museum in Bermondsey, London in 2003.
Top Brass furnishing textile for Heal & Son Ltd with eight colours, screen-printed on off white cotton, the selvedges with Heals, Top Brass by Zandra Rhodes, the opposite selvedge with Woven and Printed in England.
Each 7 x 4ft ; 2.15 x 1.22 m
They are very good, one little mark. In excellent condition. First of all I thought the background colour had changed with the light, but the colour is so even that I feel this was the original colour. They were also manufactured with a white ground, but this colour is much softer.
The Art of Zandra Rhodes. Zandra Rhodes and Anne Kinght 1985.
Artists' Textiles in Britain 1945-1970. Geoffrey Rayner and Richard Chamberlain. p 112, no 106.
The Ambassador, no 2 1964 Zandra Rhodes. Textile, fashion designer and painter. p 70
Price: on request
Ref N°: 8562
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