EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle. 

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

Zandra Rhodes

The famous fashion designer talks about how a cancer diagnosis helped her pull her life together.

(The Guardian, approx mins reading time)

At first, she thought she wanted to be an illustrator, and she still has sketchbooks from her childhood showing a precocious talent. But reluctantly, she followed her mother to Medway college, where a charismatic tutor lured her into textile design. From there, she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where she was introduced to the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, while starting to experiment with the effect on fabric design of draping it around the human body. “I was proud to be a textile designer, and I did not feel I was inferior to a painter or a sculptor. It was my metier,” she later wrote. She graduated with first class honours, and sold her degree print to Heal’s.

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