Zandra Rhodes for Marks & Spencer

LONDON, United Kingdom — She may have given up the boyfriend and lost the company, but Noelle Reno, the founder of Degrees of Freedom with ex-boyfriend Matthew Mellon, has retained her love of working in fashion. After a year hiatus in the wake of the separation (during which she filed suit against Mellon in Manhattan Superior Court), she’s back in London and hard at work on her next fashion project—trying to grow Zandra Rhodes into a global lifestyle brand.

“She belongs up there with Vivienne Westwood,” Reno told The Business of Fashion. “She set so many trends.”

Rhodes’ recent successful collaborations with Top Shop and Marks & Spencer convinced Reno that now is an opportune time to seize upon what she sees as the growing public interest in the Zandra Rhodes brand. “Zandra Rhodes is already a luxury, lifestyle brand and we are simply working on expanding product categories that offers quality and value,” Reno said. “Zandra has enjoyed working on the collaborations with major retailers and in focusing again on her core business.”

Rhodes does not currently make ready-to-wear under her own name, but she does make couture pieces for loyal customers and she has a fur license with Pologeorgis. Since 2000 she has been designing costumes for the San Diego opera, and traveling the globe giving talks on her role in fashion. “We met through one of the directors at Topshop who helped organize her collaborations three years ago,” Reno said. “I adored her from the minute I met her—she’s very humble and down to earth.”

With fashion and luxury suffering the way it is, is this really the right time for a re-launch, no matter how worthy the designer? Reno says that Zandra’s designs fit into remit of what luxury shoppers are looking for today: unique product that isn’t novelty but will last a long time.

“It’s the exact ‘lift’ we are looking for in this dismal climate,” Reno said. “Her dresses are multi-functional – they can go from day to evening to black-tie -offering consumers great potential value per wearing.” Reno describes her business plan as realistic and is negotiations with several possible strategic investors and partners at the moment.

Watch this space.

Lauren Goldstein Crowe is co-author of the critically-aclaimed book, The Towering World of Jimmy Choo.

Two legendary doyennes of the fashion world have been making news this week — and not just for their colourful fashions.

Today, Betsey Johnson announced a majority investment in her business from Boston’s Castanea Partners. Some observers are questioning Castanea’s logic for investing in a 30 year old brand whose namesake is already a grandmother and whose high-profile days are long over.  On the contrary, the business  has a solid own-retail network of 51 stores and a respectable $200m in sales. This could provide a great platform for further growth, as long as Castanea doesn’t dilute the brand’s famous quirky irreverence, which is what is most appealing to its loyal fans.

Earlier this week British fashion icon, Zandra Rhodes, garnered yet another high profile article highlighting the resurgence of interest in her designs around the world. While she doesn’t have a business on the same scale as Johnson, she is still finding news ways of capturing value from over 3 decades in the industry, using her iconic colourful style as the basis for a series of licensing agreements with MAC (for makeup), Pologeorgis (for furs), and the Dash Partnership (for jewellery).

So, why are the fashion grannies on the rise?

Well, apart from a lot of hard work (Zandra Rhodes’ daily schedule starts before dawn, sending faxes around the world, while straddling homes in London and California), they both have unique signatures for which they are famous (Johnson for her frilly girly designs and Rhodes for her vivid multi-coloured prints). They have also taken their extreme creativity and toned it down so it is more accessible to a wider audience and can therefore be extended to other categories, while still retaining the core spirit of their brands.

Many young designers, who are often content to simply follow trends and reference other designers as inspiration, could take some lessons from Johnson and Rhodes. Few emerging designers are pushing themselves enough to develop their own signatures, to establish what they will be known for.  Without this, a designer is just one of the crowd, and doesn’t stand out.

In the long run, who wants to be just like everyone else?

Photos courtesy of Sydney Morning Herald, Zandra Rhodes and Betsey Johnson