A decade on from the death of the British-Iraqi architect on March 31, 2016, the Zaha Hadid Foundation continues to preserve, study and exhibit her monumental body of work and legacy. In 2013, Hadid acquired its base, a 1930s former banana warehouse in Shad Thames, London, which had been converted in the 1980s to serve as the original location of the Design Museum. She planned to store and display her extensive collections in the modernist-lined building and to construct an apartment above it, a home overlooking the Thames. Tragically, she did not have enough time to realize this vision.
Today, the foundation offers public exhibitions and talks, and Hadid’s belongings are stored across two floors of former gallery space. The lower level is filled with architectural objects stacked on shelves: racks, boxes, labels encapsulating the life of a woman who changed architecture as we know it. The upper floor is where her personal belongings are kept. Along one side of the vast room are rails of clothes cloaked in white dust covers, each one tagged by her team during her life with the designer’s name and an image. There are 1,200 pieces, the archivist tells me, not including accessories. Following initial estate disputes, the contents of the archive are still being cataloged—a trove that continues to yield insights into her life and creative process.
We unzip one of the dust covers to reveal a yellow satin cape by Prada, which Hadid wore, accessorized with striking black sleeves, when she received the Stirling Prize in 2010. It lies flat, devoid of shape without the body that once held it with such gravitas. On a nearby table sits a set of connected PVC circles that unfolds into an extraordinary armor-like cape by Junya Watanabe. One of the few items mounted on a mannequin is a hot-pink coat with two frilled openings, designed by Rei Kawakubo, that Hadid wore at the Serpentine Gallery’s summer party in 2008. In 2000, she designed a temporary pavilion for the gallery’s 30th-anniversary gala, inaugurating the annual tradition celebrating its 25th commission this summer.
Other dust covers are labelled with a mix of established names—Issey Miyake, Simone Rocha, Claude Montana—and lesser-known designers including Thomas Tait and Florencia Kozuch, and stores such as Apoc. They strike me less as components of a wardrobe than as a long, meticulous argument about form. A kind of self-portrait rendered through clothes.
It’s tempting to treat Hadid’s fashion as an amusing footnote to her career as a “starchitect.” The first woman to have won the Pritzker Prize, in 2004, she created an impressive, impactful body of work: the 1993 Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, her first major built project, displaying many of the ideas she would later develop; the 2009 MAXXI Museum in Rome, which earned her the Stirling Prize; the 2010 Guangzhou Opera House in China, named that year’s “Best Public Project” by Architectural Record; and the London Aquatics Centre, which drew the world’s eye during the 2012 Olympics, to name just a few. But standing among the rails, it becomes clear that clothing was a creative preoccupation she cared about as she did architectural form, and that one was an extension of another.
On the opposite wall, shelves of brown boxes rise in eight regular stories. The archivist explains that Hadid’s shoes will be stored here, and opens one box to show a pair of heels nestled in a custom-made support, produced by the foundation’s in-house technician, as the collection is carefully conserved and prepared for museum loans. Another box contains shoes by Roksanda, one of several London-based designers, along with Christopher Kane, Thomas Tait and Phoebe English, whose designs Hadid wore in their early careers.
Alexandra Carl, a stylist who spent months gaining access to Hadid’s shoe collection for her 2024 book, “Collecting Fashion: Nostalgia, Passion, Obsession,” recalls the archive as “super low-fi” when she first visited. Opening boxes without knowing what she would find, she was struck that the pieces felt lived-in. She came to understand that Hadid’s fashion was not performative, but the wardrobe of a working life. “I love that the items featured in the book are real items; you can see how they’ve been loved and worn,” she tells me.
Being there takes me back to meeting Hadid around 12 years ago, at her gallery in Clerkenwell, a space she opened in 2013 to show furniture, design and other collaborations. I was working at the V&A, and she allowed us to bring patrons to visit. I remember her unforgettable presence. She seemed to occupy the room decisively and without apology. Of all the objects she showed us, one pair of shoes was unlike anything I’d seen before: tiered platforms painted in rose gold, like small buildings for feet. To my surprise, she came over and suggested that I try them on. I slid my feet into them and rose nine or 10 inches. They were sculptures more than shoes, and it felt empowering to wear them, though I didn’t dare walk too far. Only later did I learn that Hadid had designed the distinctively cantilevered heels in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas for United Nude. It made sense that she would be preoccupied with footwear. The shoe is the most intimate structure we trust with our weight. It’s architecture at the scale of balance and motion.
People who worked closely with Hadid describe her wardrobe as a system. May Yee, who worked as her private assistant and EA for nine years, remembers it as extensive and highly ordered. “She had photos of her clothes,” Yee says, “so in a loose way her pieces were cataloged.” Hadid didn’t have a stylist but did have a housekeeper who organized her wardrobe, and Yee would assist by surveying the shops that Hadid liked and bringing her items to try on and then either buy or return.
Often Hadid would begin with a base outfit of a black dress and leggings, and then build outwards from there. These under-garments were typically made by a tailor and replicated once she found a shape she liked, creating a canvas for the coats, jackets and dresses she wore on top. These outer layers were designed for maximal transformation.
I t’s revealing that Hadid’s relationship with fashion was characterized by playfulness as much as a play on form. John Vidal, her hairdresser and close friend, began working with her in the early 2000s and recalls being struck by her intense passion for clothes and drive for a concept. “It needs an idea,” Vidal recalls her saying, not just about hair, but about everything. “There was a juxtaposition,” he says, “where she wore very structured garments, but she wanted quite soft hair.” On one occasion, when Vidal was unsure whether a new approach was working, Hadid looked up into the mirror and said to him, “I love you, but this isn’t one of your finest moments.”
As their friendship deepened, Vidal introduced his friend to shows during London Fashion Week and beyond, and at home they would stage informal runways so that he could give opinions. “That’s all we ever talked about: clothes,” he says. Hadid would giggle when she tried things on. “Like a child.” It wasn’t frivolity but openness. “She was open to wonderment,” Vidal recalls, “open to the idea anything was possible.” It’s a crucial corrective to the caricature of Hadid as purely formidable—an iconoclast defined by a steely character and not without controversy. There is a quietly tragic air to the archive: a decade has passed since Hadid’s death, yet a sense of joy persists, the pleasure she took in transformation and the freedom clothes afforded her.
That’s not to say that her fashion was entirely distinct from her architecture. In reality, there was a synergy between the two. Her fascination with Issey Miyake, for instance, can be read as practical—as Miyake’s pleats travel well and resist creases in an almost miraculous way, ideal for a woman constantly in motion. But the fascination must also have been conceptual—pleats are an engineered device that allows fabric to expand and contract, to animate the body without constricting it.
Hadid’s buildings often do something similar, even when made from steel or concrete. It’s hard not to draw parallels with the pleated metal façade of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum—opened in 2012 on the campus of Michigan State University—whose planes fold and angle to respond to circulation around the site, or the tiered, undulating surfaces of the Al Janoub Stadium in Qatar, inaugurated in 2019. These are architectures that look fluid but are choreographed; shaped by the movement of people, light and context.
M elodie Leung, who worked closely with Hadid and is now a director at the practice, recalls that the architect would take members of staff shopping. A trip to Margiela in New York or Miami was not retail therapy so much as research. It opened, Leung says, “a whole level of creativity.” The gesture suggests a way of mentoring: rather than telling people what to think, Hadid put them in front of objects that demanded thought.
Leung remembers a Yohji Yamamoto scarf, a square with ribbons designed to be tied in multiple ways, that Hadid twisted and reconfigured into a halter top. The point was not about styling but about form: fabric as something mutable, capable of being redirected into new structures. In workshops, she explored similar ideas through paper origami with students. How could something be twisted, peeled, folded? What other shape was latent within it?
Hadid’s language evolved constantly in response to culture, technology and art. Though she was renowned as the “Queen of the Curve,” her work was never just about curves versus straight lines. It was about the fold, the pleat, the shift—the inherent properties and capabilities of materials. For her, the same properties that were inherent in fabric were also possible in architecture.
Her fashion collaborations, such as her jewelry for Georg Jensen, bags for Fendi and Louis Vuitton, and a ring for Bulgari, could simplistically be framed as the predictable outcome of celebrity. But seen alongside her personal archive, they read differently. They are a continuation of the visual language of her architectural work—test sites where ideas could be employed at a smaller scale, with the intimacy that fashion allows.
Hadid’s absence from the architectural landscape (even though her studio lives on) feels like a void, like the enlivening form absent from the garments. Yee recalls being in a New York shop and telling Hadid that she liked a bag because it looked “so ’80s.” She still remembers her reply: “I like the ’80s too, but you’ve got to keep doing something new.” Standing in the archive, with Hadid’s vision palpable in every object, it feels less like advice than an expression of creative hunger.
