We all know clothes have meaning, beyond just looking nice. We’ve often talked on this podcast about the importance of how they are made. This week, we’re considering how fashion’s meaning stretches beyond supply chains and our wardrobes, to shape our culture and the way we see ourselves collectively. How does fashion see itself when it comes to race and privilege? How about the male gaze?
We sit down with Caryn Franklin, journalist, style icon, fashion citizen (not consumer, please!), one-time presenter of The Clothes Show and all-time national treasure. These days her work centres on education and activism - she’s a visiting professor of diverse selfhood at Kingston School of Art, in London, and gained her MSc in applied psychology specialising in selfhood, objectification, inclusivity and gender bias.
Partly, this interview is a personal one about a life in clothes but it’s also a provocation: How can we use fashion as a vehicle for positive self-esteem, rather than allowing it to make too many of us feel small, too much of the time?
All up, rollocking good chat with Caryn Franklin, MBE. Enjoy!
NOTES
ABOUT
CARYN FRANKLIN started her work life as a fashion editor at i-D MAGAZINE under the aegis of publisher/ art director Terry Jones. She started as a presenter on The Clothes Show in 1986 and stayed for 12 years, helping put London on the map as a hub of emerging talent while she was at it.
In 2013 she collected an MBE for services to Positive Body Image and Diversity in Fashion.
Her latest book is in audio format, co-written with Professor Keon West. Buy SKEWED, DE-CODING MEDIA BIAS, How Bias Distorts Our View of Other People and How to Make it Stop on Audible.
Clare mentions a Vin + Omi show at LFW. Listen to Episode 168 with the British fashion design duo.
THE CLOTHES SHOW From 1986 to 1998, Caryn was a presenter on the iconic British telly programme, beaming into the homes of millions at 5pm on Sunday evenings. As she tells Clare, she usually dressed herself, and often took the bus or train to shoot already dressed in the clothes she planned to wear on camera. Why not? Fashion is meant to be worn. (We nearly titled this Ep: The Practical Magic of Clothes Show Lady Caryn Franklin… )
Caryn encourages us to see ourselves as CITIZEN PARTICIPANTS rather than a CONSUMERS.
STYLE A self described “canny shopper – always have been” Caryn says she’s pretty much stopped buying clothes these days, she favoured British designers like GALLIANO, JOHN RICHMOND and VIVIENNE WESTWOOD in her clothes shows, and bought from sample sales where possible. Her signature headwraps were practical as well as fabulous - meant she didn’t have to spend hours in the hair-dressers’ chair. Outifts get re-invented over the years, worn in different ways. Pin them up, turn them around. “I’ve got a thing about proportion,” she says, “I’m gifted with a safety pin!”
““Anything with pockets, that gets extra marks!””
ARCHIVES…
Here are some vintage snaps, via Caryn’s website - FRANKLIN ON FASHION Read the post here.
““I’m a good stylist so I know how to ring the changes with the same stuff.””
The 80S were PURE FASHION FUN with the real runway on the streets and at clubs like The Wag Club, Camden Palace, BeatClub and of course Taboo. LEIGH BOWERY was the perhaps most famous club kid icon of them all, a supremely creative fashion figure who “used his own body as a canvas for self-expression”. More in this fun i-D article from 2015. Watch him take tea with Caryn on The Clothes Show below. For more on Bowery, check out Episodes 172 with Andrew Logan and 13 with Stephen Jones.
In 2009, Caryn, model Erin O’Connor and PR Debra Bourne set up ALL WALKS BEYOND THE CATWALK to challenge the fashion industry's dependence on unachievable and limited body and beauty ideals.
Discover Caryn’s ELLE article, “Is Fashion Racist, Ageist & Fattist?” here
ME TOO Predatory photographer Terry Richardson was enabled for years. Allegations of Richardson’s predatory behavior first surfaced in two 2005 lawsuits. Then this article from 2014, and this New York magazine one from the same year, that exposed his behaviour for all to see. So how come it took top brands until 2017 to stop working with him?
MALE GAZE & POWER IMBALANCE Writes Caryn in Refinery 29: “Systems where a sense of entitlement fuels the knowing exploitation of the many by the few are in part responsible for this messed-up situation. But gender politics and the privilege of masculinity to experience the culture of male predator/female prey as normal, or observe other disparities such as the pay gap as inevitable, are just as culpable … The benefits that boys and men receive from a culture where women are presented as scantily dressed and sexually available to serve the male gaze, while assuring them that all is as it should be, needs to be shot down in flames.” Read in full here.
Listen to Episode 35 with Sara Ziff from the Model Alliance here.
Caryn’s late partner Mandu Saldaan was a writer whose brilliant film about music and race, YOUNG SOUL REBELS, won the Critics Prize at Cannes in 1991. Five months into their relationship, Mandu was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Read their story here.
HEALTH PRIVILEGE “There is a need for health professionals to identify social determinants of health (SDOH) and understand the role they play in patients' health,” write researchers Elizabeth Brown abnd Brandi White in their 2020 paper for the journal Health Equity. Further reading.
UNCONSCIOUS BIASES are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness.
MICRO AGRESSIONS “An Asian-American student is complimented by a professor for speaking perfect English, but it's actually his first language. A black man notices that a white woman flinches and clutches her bag as she sees him in the elevator she's about to enter, and is painfully reminded of racial stereotypes. A woman speaks up in an important meeting, but she can barely get a word in without being interrupted by her male colleagues… There's a name for what's happening in these situations, when people's biases against marginalized groups reveal themselves in a way that leaves their victims feeling uncomfortable or insulted: microaggressions.” Via Vox. Read the rest here.
Emma Dabiri’s book What White People Can Do Next encourages going beyond ALLYSHIP “to coalition”. She says: “Allyship offers charity whereas coalition is more about solidarity. I draw that link between environmental justice and racial justice because they are two powerful movements, and very necessary and urgent forms of activism today. When you go back to the roots of it all, you see that the same system that is putting our environment under threat is the same system that gave us the racialized hierarchy, the idea of a white race, a Black race and everything in between.”
FACE, Fashion Academics Creating Equality, was formed in the UK to “pursue the accelerated recruitment and progression of Black academics and student creatives as well as the inclusion of Black style and culture to course and module evaluation metrics.” Discover here.
The film mentioned at the end is DECONSTRUCTING KAREN. It explores the Race2Dinner concept led by founders Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. During these dinners, Jackson and Rao facilitate radically honest conversations about race with eight white women at a host’s home. In the documentary, Rao begins one such dinner with a simple, chatter-stopping, smile-freezing buzz-kill of a request.
“So, I want a show of hands of everyone at this table who is racist.” Via Forbes. More here.
Still from Deconstructing Karen
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