Zandra Rhodes visits the Silk Museum

Macclesfield Silk museum welcomed a very special guest over the weekend.

Iconic fashion designer, Dame Zandra Rhodes, DBE, visited the Silk Museum in Macclesfield to see the work that is taking place to conserve the endangered craft of silk weaving. During her visit she metgraduates Bea Uprichard and Ruth Farris who are creating the first new designs to be woven there in decades.

Nicknamed the princess of punk, Dame Zandra established her eponymous fashion brand in the late 1960s and is renowned for perfecting the art of print. Her colourful designs have adorned international stars including Freddie Mercury, Diana Ross and Barbara Streisand as well as British Royalty, most notably Princess Diana and Princess Anne.

Dame Zandra and her companion Janet Slee visited the grade II listed Paradise Mill, part of the Silk Museum, where one of the largest collections of silk Jacquard handlooms remain in its original setting. The atmospheric working mill was one of many, historically, that produced silks in Macclesfield for luxury retailers including Liberty of London. It now remains the only original Victorian silk mill in the town.

Two members of the team at the museum, Daniel Hearn and Trish O’Halloran have been restoring two of the silk handlooms – a painstaking process – which requires enormous skill. This important work has been funded by the Association of Industrial Archaeology.

Now, one of the looms is in operation and Bea and Ruth have been looking through the archive of pattern books and the work of past designers to inform their own designs, which have a modern sensibility.

Dame Zandra spent time looking at examples of our vast archive of pattern books with Senior Curator Bryony Renshaw and talking to grand daughter of the last Mill owners Karin Sheldon.

Dame Zandra has been visiting the mills in Macclesfield since the late 1950s.