Zaha Hadid maintained a deep interest in fashion across her life and work, with a personal style that was as distinctive as her architecture.
While her penchant for avant-garde Japanese design was well known, it followed years of experimentation with her wardrobe. Hadid spoke in interviews of altering her childhood clothes, ‘cutting the sleeves off’, and later wrapping, pinning and stapling layers of silk as a student in London to create ephemeral outfits. She continued to design and customise garments into the 1980s, and this hand-painted jacket is part of a small surviving group preserved within ZHF’s Collections.
The piece is a rare instance of a purely abstract, painted work by Hadid. Created around 1985, its waterfall silhouette in linen acts as a canvas which Hadid adorned with expressive shapes, swirls and gradated ‘wooshes’. Her paintings and furniture designs of the time, such as the interior suite created for 24 Cathcart Road (1985–6), share this signature visual language, and the same motifs are found within one of Hadid’s sketchbooks, where multiple drawings suggest the conception and development of the painted jacket. The garment has also revealed other playful hallmarks of Hadid, including a characteristically asymmetric half-collar and a single googly eye embedded in its hem.
At a time of skyrocketing visibility in the architectural press and a spate of international exhibitions, extraordinary clothing like Hadid’s painted jacket amplified her originality. She opted to wear the piece in a striking portrait by photographer Jillian Edelstein, which fronted the album-like catalogue for her first French retrospective in Bordeaux in 1989. Pictured against her painting, New York, Manhattan: A New Calligraphy of Plan (1987), the synergy between Hadid’s work and self is clear, as the jacket’s vibrant gestures echo those within her monumental vision of the metropolis.