Sometimes you get to meet your hero’s and its brilliant when they turn out to be as great as you imagined. Caryn was a fashion icon when I was at Uni. Still is in my eyes. She describes herself as a disruptive fashion lover and has been doing that throughout her career from i-D magazine, to forever pushing boundaries on The Clothes Show, and is still a fashion and identity commentator and activist. She is a person who through continual learning has discovered how the power of what you say and how you choose to say it can change perceptions and can make you sit up and think again. We cover a lot of this in our interview which I am sure you will love. Before you dive in here are some brilliant things Caryn has said that I found during my research that I thought you would like too.
‘Timing is everything.’
‘Clothes are a superpower.’
‘Do something and bring others along with you.’
‘If you buy well, you don't have to keep renewing.’
‘Go with your gut feeling. It will save your life.’
‘I'm always interested in other people. People are fascinating.’
D: While getting ready for our chat it's been really lovely to re acquaint myself with all the amazing things that you've done. Normally I start from the beginning, from childhood influences and walk through your career and it’s a wonderful career and I am looking forward to talking to you about it. As usual we will start with the question where did you grow up, Caryn?
K: I grew up in Hounslow, which is on the flight path to Heathrow airport on the Piccadilly line, so, I could easily get myself to London. I was the eldest of five, in a very traditional household, and went to Feltham Comprehensive. While I was a student there, I decided I wanted to study A level law having done really well at O level, but they didn't have it on the curriculum. So I campaigned for it. It worked and I came out with my law A level. That was one of the early experiences where I thought, ‘OK, you don't have to accept things as they are.’
D: Campaigning right from the beginning.
K: I still have a letter, it’s a reply from a well known BBC sports commentator in 1976 who I wrote to when I was 17. I had been really excited that for once on Saturday sports we were going to see a woman compete in the male bastion, the Grand National. Charlotte Brew would be first ever female rider in the Grand National. He interviewed her before the race saying ‘how dangerous it was to have a silly young gal on a horse, and that she was inexperienced.’ Enraged, I dashed off a complaint letter. The race took place the following week and not only did she she stay on the horse (the Grand National in notorious for horse and jockey falls), Charlotte Brew beat quite a few seasoned male jockeys. I got a reply with some humble pie… ‘I'm sorry, you think I'm sexist…’ Again, it was an indication to me that I could have an opinion. Maybe somebody else might have to think harder. I caught up later in life with Charlotte Brew, and was able to say to her, ‘did you know that you had so many young, teenage fangirls’ when she was probably only about 24 at the time, not that much older than I was then. She said she had heard that a lot of women wrote in, and that the secretaries had said to the old school commentator ‘we're not writing your replies’. They thought he was behind the times as well. I really enjoyed that. He had to write all the replies himself.
D: What were your early fashion influences, were there any when you were growing up? Did anyone at home influence your path into fashion?
C: Dressmaking, yes, as I said I was the eldest of five, and clothes were expensive. Mum's sewing machine was always out, and from a really early age, I could see that that was the only way I could access fashionable clothes. I made my first hot pants at 11, and the midi dress followed. Mum was a great teacher and I was a good student, so for me that sewing machine was absolute liberation. We would receive clothing parcels from relatives because five children were a lot to clothe and feed. I would open the parcels and work out what I could customise, cut differently or maybe just take up a hem. It wasn't like we were getting fashionable clothes at all, so I certainly understood very early on that it was a language I could use, to give the optics of what I was wearing to give me some…I didn't know the word credibility then, or the term, some relevance, but I sensed that was what I wanted to display. Obviously, I was mostly seeing the sort of people I wanted to fit in with at Feltham Comprehensive, and I learned very quickly that extreme credibility would be getting sent home for not wearing school uniform correctly and wearing some other adaptation. Schools would never do that now they'd never send you home.
D: Yet for a while recently young black people who wore their hair out and who were turning up with their afros were being sent home from school.
C: And that’s a disgrace. Natural hairstyles were prohibited for people of colour and yet we as white people would celebrate those same styles on white people…I remember again when I was quite young, a film called 10, and an actress called Bo Derek who in the film had cornrows, braids in her hair. Of course at the time I didn't frame this to myself in this way, but the press, the white press, were all over her and yet people of colour were under pressure to westernise their hair and could never have worn their hair like that to school. At that time I didn't have the vocabulary to explain it to myself.
D: I wouldn't have had it then either.
D: At university you studied graphic design and photography, but not fashion. Creativity was obviously always part of your education too. Why did you decide to study graphic design and photography and how did you shift towards styling?
C: I came from a conventional home. I didn't even know you could study fashion design. I didn't even know it existed, and in a way I'm glad because I wouldn't have wanted to study it. I enjoyed doing it as a hobby. I was much more interested in fashion media, although I didn't know that was a thing then either. I studied graphic design to be able to make my own magazines and photography came with that, so I could photograph people. We're going right back to the days of cow gum (a type of glue) and scalpels. Nothing was digital, but that was my way forward. We had an amazing fashion department at Kingston School of Art, and I became friends with everyone in fashion. I would photograph them and their garments, and it would all go into my little magazines. Helen Story and I were in the same year, and I would wear her garments. During the fittings, which I did for lots of friends, I would be standing listening to the tutors and realised that that was an education in itself, hearing that commentary from tutors in the crits. I then did a postgraduate year, at Central St. Martins, because I really felt that I wanted a better engagement with the pulse of the industry, and I felt that the pulse was the centre of London. Central St. Martins was a great space and because we didn't have social networking, it was about meeting people in real time, and going to all the clubs. After the postgraduate show I sent photos to i-D magazine to say, this is what I'm doing, and these are the people I am hanging out with who I think should be in the magazine. That's how I began to engage with i-D, which would then be my first job.
D: I was a street style photographer for a while, but you were very much ahead of me with that because you were out photographing people on the street for i-D, from the beginning.
C: In the early days I worked with Steve Johnson, who’d had just finished shooting the Pink Punk book with Terry Jones. Terry was at the art director at Vogue, and he was far more interested in the bars, the street wear, street culture, clubs, ideas, music and emerging design talent. There was this incredible space where London suddenly had a lot of attention from the bigger more conservative European fashion centres, who were all coming over to have a look.
It was the best job in the world, I would finish work, around 7 or 8, maybe hang out, go to a pub, then go to a club. Sometimes we would work late at night at i-D because of Terry’s passion project. As the graphic designer I would help with whatever he was working on. We'd go out and I would point people out, go up to them and ask ‘can we take your photo for i-D’. Some people said no because it was cool to be cool, but most people said ‘yeah, go on then’. I took their name, not a mobile phone number or an e-mail, because there weren’t any then, then took the details of what they were wearing. It was all about where did you get it? Tell us what you're wearing. It was inevitably borrowed or from some jumble sale. It was rarely a top designer, but it would often be ‘my friend made this, they are a fashion student’. I really loved that time. I would pitch up at work at 10am the next day even though I'd been out till 1 in the morning. But that's youth for you.
D: When you love doing something you show up for it. How did that take you into TV and The Clothes Show?
C: There were lots of magazine programmes that were starting to feature what they called youth culture and emerging designers. Crews from all over the globe would often come to
i-D and ask ‘who do we need to visit? Give us names and introduce us to these people.’ I did that side of things for free because I was promoting my mates. As a result I contributed to TV show’s like The Tube, where I'd go up to Newcastle (where it was filmed) with designers, decked out in some heavy statement looks. We’d go up on the train packed with squaddies, there’d be nowhere to sit because it was a Friday night, we'd go up do the show and come all the way back the same night. I then presented for the first time by chance, for a programme called Swank for Channel 4. I had gathered people that would fit their content, they said ‘we haven’t got our presenter for this bit, why don't you step in and tell us about it?’ Luckily, because I knew it back to front and didn’t need to be briefed it was easy enough to do. I honestly didn’t think that I would move into TV though.
But a couple of things happened, and I think these things are important, because we sometimes talk about careers like they are seamless moments of moving through, that there weren't big, quite extreme interruptions. My partner at the time, who I had not been with for long, but long enough to realise that he was in trouble, that we were in trouble; five months into the relationship he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, back then they told you ‘there’s nothing we can do. It's a degenerative illness, effectively it will get worse.’ He was 25. We looked everywhere that we could for hope, and that costs money and my wage at i-D wasn’t big. The Clothes Show approached me in 1986. At that point they had aired for six weeks on a lunchtime schedule. When I met with them, I thought they meant, can you give us some designers to feature like I had been doing for the other shows. Then realised, ‘you’re not actually talking about that, are you? You're asking me to present’ They said ‘yes’, I went, ‘no thanks, it's very mainstream.’ When I went back to i-D and told Terry that I had just said no to this, he said, ‘I think that's a bit hasty. Because we don’t have any advertising you could be on the BBC insisting they say you’re from i-D magazine, and that you're the specialist street wear correspondent.’ I was cool with that and did it for two years while still being at i-D. Then in 1988, that’s when Mateda’s dad got the diagnosis, that's when I realised that maybe I needed more work in TV, I had to ramp up my earnings to pay for private treatment and that was the reason I crossed over. I always thought I was going to be in a more niche space, it certainly suits me. I’m not someone who felt the need to stand in front of a big crowd. Turns out I enjoyed it.
D: How did you feel taking on such a public role and what challenges did you face?
C: Inevitably, when you haven’t done anything like that before and suddenly you’re stepping onto a really mainstream platform, (we’d been pretty much under the radar prior to that, but very much focused on our own (i-D) community), it does start to make you question things. At first I kept thinking, ‘so am I not going to get any presenter lessons? Are you going to show me how to do this professionally?’ But I learnt on the job. One of the things that really worked for me was that I knew what I was talking about, and I would always write myself a little script so I could say it rhythmically, and clearly without ums and ahs.
Also I really like people and their stories. Encouraging them and getting the best out of them became a joy. By putting them at ease, helping them understand, that I know these people have walked through the door with massive cameras because in the 80s and 90s, the kit was huge. People would say ‘what are you gonna ask me, what are you gonna ask me?’ I always wanted to help them understand that even if you say it and you don't like it, it's not live, we can have another go. Working on a mainstream TV show like The Clothes Show opened my eyes and understanding of how to engage with people who were so excited by this emerging mainstream fashion scene, that they didn't even know they had. If you asked them about designers, they would say Armani, Fiorucci, Valentino, or Chanel, but they couldn't name any British designers or get excited about what was happening in London. I began to see they felt very much like outsiders, they would say to me ‘I can't really see anything that would fit me’ or ‘I don't know how to wear it’ or ‘I don't think I'll be able to wear that very well.’
It made me realise that I was in this little i-D clique where everyone was totally confident with making a big statement visually about themselves. My heart really went out to middle England. I realised that ordinary women were accepting fashion into their lives as a taste leadership authority and they didn't question it. They felt that the right looks and trends were something that they had to get right and if they'd got it wrong - it was terrible.
I especially saw that with women, and it added a discontent that they weren't going to be able to relate to the fashion models they were starting to see on our programme, and in mainstream magazines. That's when we started having team conversations. There were a lot of women working on The Clothes Show and we knew we wanted to show a broader range of ages and bodies. It wasn't the easiest thing to do though, because there were no sample sizes, but we could prerecord and show something that went out the next week, which meant that we could in pull different sized clothing from the shops. However we had a traditional male boss who held a tight rein on things, something I've experienced for many years working in women’s fashion.
But I sort of fell in love with people, men and women, who were interested in fashion and wanted to understand, ‘how do I get that look for my body.’
D: That takes us nicely into my next question which is, you've always been a voice for change in fashion and you have explained why. You could have chosen to tow the line and not make waves. You have said in the past that what you were doing was ‘stealth feminism’ and ‘gently agitating for change.’ You could see early on the need for diversity, body difference, life-size, which is a lovely term that you use, age and for every Body. How did you go about changing the narrative?
C: Sometimes not as easily as I would have liked. I threatened to resign from The Clothes Show a couple of times when models were cast who were obviously ill, and would ask ‘how was this model invited onto the show? I'm resigning if that model is used.’ Obviously, we worked hard to not make anyone feel bad. Those that didn’t make the edit still got paid.
The makeover emerged as the perfect vehicle to include ordinary everyday women excited by fashion. That was a space in which we could really discuss how the clothes made them feel and you could see everybody fall in love with themselves at the mirror because they had been reinvented. That was a very powerful thing to see and very often very moving actually.
I noticed in the 90s, and this would have coincided with the birth of my first daughter, that models were getting thinner, that European fashion had ramped up production values and image production. There was a lot of money being pumped into fashion houses and these very glossy images started to appear, which were heavily post produced and retouched, of very thin models. Kate Moss was called the Super Waif back then. Her status was that she was thinner than all the rest.
It also coincided with my younger sister coming to live with me to be my nanny because I had a newborn baby. It was barely noticed that I had any maternity leave because I didn't. I went straight back to work, I had to.
D: That was a huge weight to carry, mother, carer, career.
C: Those first five months of my eldest daughter’s life were really tough. But I didn't remain a carer because her father's illness had progressed quite considerably, and he needed 24-hour care. The relationship wouldn't have survived it, the pressure of that and many other things meant that we struggled to stay together. That’s when my sister came in to help and during our conversations it surfaced that she had an eating disorder. She really educated me on what she'd felt and the pressure that she'd felt under to be model thin and the low self-esteem that she'd had experienced. That was when I started to think and look around and feel the pressures people were going through. Also parents started to walk up to me in the street and say ‘some of these models on the programmes that we see, your programme, (because we'd obviously cover the Milan catwalks) the models are too thin and my daughter thinks that she's, got to diet down.’
I felt this huge sense of responsibility and I badgered the programme to let me do something on eating disorders which took a really long time for them to approve. When I finally did it, the programme exec’s said if people respond well to this, maybe we'll do more. After a feature on something like, ‘where do I get that shirt from’ we were used to getting 27,000 phone calls asking for more info. But we didn’t have the same response to this and obviously there was no social media at the time to talk about it further. I think people felt somehow that it didn't fit into The Clothes Show.
I disagreed because I feel that fashion isn't just the veneer, I have always felt that fashion is so much more than the optics Fashion is the politics behind it, the industry, the changes, the technical advances, the ethical rights of makers, all of that.
So, I started to talk in schools. It wasn't difficult to say to a school I'd like to come and talk to all your teenagers to tell them truth about modelling and the industry. Then I became an ambassador for the Eating Disorder Association and did various fund-raising events for them. That was happening on one hand.
Then on the other I was being very vocal about women who wanted to buy good design being ignored beyond a size 14. That would often come up in interviews and again women would come up in the street and say ‘it's like the fashion industry are ignoring us or don't see that we exist.’ We were now getting 13 million viewers per week. In those day’s people didn’t yet recognise any magazine fashion editors but they all knew what I looked like.
There were also a lot of commercial spin-off’s. People would want me to rock up at a shopping mall and create a show. More and more I got fed up with the lack of production, so I started my own company so I could say ‘yes, I'll come and do this, but we're going to produce the show.’ That took me to the mid 2000s.
D: Does that include The Clothes Show live?
C: Yes, that was obviously a big outfit that went until 2016. But every year I would say ‘can we have larger models and older models on the catwalk’ and every year they would say ‘no’. I would say’ it's mothers and daughters who spend their money here, they want to spend, they want to find stuff for themselves and they want to be given styling ideas, but every year, this was overlooked.
That was until the Event Producer was replaced by a woman. She had been the assistant and I used to bang on about it in meetings. When she got to power she said we're going to have different shapes and sizes, I was thrilled and we got it for one year in 2016. So much in fashion had changed by that point anyway especially ordering online that this year would be the end of Clothes Show Live. When we started in 1989, there was no Internet, high streets were in their infancy. No one had access to information and they couldn't get in to see a catwalk show. Sure they had seen me report on it on the telly, but they wanted to experience it. Very clever of Jeff Banks (amongst others) to come up with a live version of the TV show back then. Its common practice now. The Clothes Show Live had over 25 good years. But it was time for it to finish.
D: By 2016 lots of people were blogging and fast fashion was ramping up.
C: In earlier days, we had seen the democratisation of style and fashion. Debenhams began to do designer collaborations and we did a piece for The Clothes Show, interviewing Jasper Conran who said ‘I've got much more buying power now, I can get the top quality fabrics I want, for a good price, because I'm buying on mass. So women aren't getting less than they would if I were making this for the catwalk.’ At the time I felt that for a good price, fashion was available to a broader range of people women who could now access great design. It was a great feeling.
But I never foresaw, (because everything was still being made in the UK and in Europe) the industrial scale, obscene business models that we have now from exploitative capitalists. The cost of the clothing really is like a price bribe, and they have to sell such big volumes in order to be able to create this, bribe to come and buy.
The Clothes Show could have been there educating people about this. We could have made a massive difference to people’s understanding of the gross overproduction that is rampant now. I checked a fact only yesterday for a presentation because I thought this can't be right, only 1% of clothing is recycled.
D: Yes, I've heard this too because the systems aren't in place to make things completely circular, there are people working on them. Blended fibres are the problem, pulling them apart is the aim.
D: Your activism saw you work with Extinction Rebellion for a while. What did you do with them?
C: Someone asked me if I would have my picture taken, I've always said I'm an advocate, I'm not an expert. I agreed to join the pledge ‘nothing new for 52’. This was an initiative that stuck with me and I have carried on doing it ever since. I stopped buying new clothes, that's not to say that I don't make an occasional, very thought through purchase, but mostly second hand or recustomised, remade, upcycled all of that. When I did that initiative and posted about it, I began to be asked (only for a brief period) to speak on XR panels, which I did willingly.
My position has always been that we will never achieve material sustainability and sourcing if we don't have emotional sustainability and I felt always that women had been so undermined in terms of feeling that they could speak up, that they had the right to be seen and heard because they weren’t empowered by clothing, plus for women within the industry it can be very exploitive. Today we talk about mental health but we weren't then and I felt that that was my space.
I met Safia (Minney) in the really early days of All Walks Beyond The Catwalk, which was the campaign I co-founded with others in the fashion industry to make this very visible, this challenge to body and beauty ideals. All Walks transformed into a charity. Safia was a fashion friend who I really respected and I asked her if she would be a trustee. She said yeah, let's swap. I'll come and be a trustee for you, I'm going to Dhaka and Bangladesh, I'd like you to come with me and document my trip. It wasn't the first time I had met garment workers. With The Clothes Show, and Oxfam we did what was called The Clean Clothes Code, were we went to free trade zones and spoke to workers in factories, patrolled by guards and dogs. We had had to wait because they had a power cut, so I certainly understood the situation there. With Safia I got much closer; speaking to survivors from Rana Plaza, anybody would recognise that things had to be very different from here on. It made it very easy for me to really step away from the general fashion process. Shortly after that trip I took my MSc in Applied Psychology.
D: You've always been interested in education and doing your Masters was of course an extension of this. On your website you have a great list of all the different talks you do and that you can go into places and give. I want to hear them all. Everything you learned from doing your Masters is very far reaching. Can you tell us more about it here?
C: I was really lucky to study under Doctor Carolyn Mair who wrote ‘The Phycology of Fashion,’ she also created the course at the London College of Fashion it was Applied Psychology in Fashion. She designed it specially to help us understand fundamental concepts that translated to behaviours and emotions in and around issues of identity. In the early days I would say that I was a Fashion Commentator, Broadcaster. But I began to realise that actually I am and have always been a Fashion and Identity Commentator. Although I always talked about it since i-D days, I didn't have the breadth of vocabulary that I have now.
It meant I could make more targeted challenges to subjects and be able to also bring in academic study. I certainly found it helpful when sitting in a boardroom trying to justify the women I had cast for the photos when creating in answer to a brief. I was aware that emotional intelligence, instinct and feminism wasn't enough, and I didn't know I needed it but once I had Psychology, I was able to bring science into the room and was able to say, ‘well, studies show.’
It gave me a space to detach myself almost, because I'd get so aeriated, my business partner would have her hand clenching my knee underneath the table, to say nonverbally ‘don't kick off, don't kick off, just let's keep it calm,’ because I would always feel like ‘oh not this again.’
That ultimately again, I've worked out that you the client who are all male, want to be able to have sexual fantasies about all your models. They've gotta be shagable, so that's why you don't want older women, why you don't want women, who are not young and deferential.
The gender lens and gender bias, women have normalised in their life, I was able to give a language to, and I was able to design studies around that. One was interviewing photographers to see whether they understood what objectification was and what they might do to create images without that performative male gaze. Obviously, you have to do a whole load of literature research to justify your position. Which led me to think, we've really got to educate women about the habituation to male gaze; how we have all normalised self-objectification which can have disastrous mental health effects. But also boys and men have normalised women as objects. This thinking dehumanises women. Which means that the voice isn't heard.
I had decided I wanted to make, another book about it, but I knew it wouldn't be perceived as a very sexy topic. I called the working title of the book Sexy, but I couldn't get a bite on it. I carried on researching it and tracked down a forensic psychologist who had done a great deal of study about the fact that jurors, male and female, bring biases and stereotypes (of course) into a jury setting. One of the ways it plays out very strongly is in rape trials. He created psychometric testing for rape jurors to be able to predict who would find in favour of the male defendant, even though the police felt they had a watertight case against him. Rape conviction statistics are dismally low. Part of the reason I learned is that as a result of media acculturation to the objectified or sexualised woman in images, our brains dehumanise those we see as body parts. Psychology called this the devaluing of moral agency, so we don’t believe the women. My forensic psychologist friend inspired me to feel there was a bigger more mainstream conversation around the repetition of imagery featuring the dehumanisation of women in fashion. I thought to myself, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I'm going to make sure I can write about it. Which I did with my last book (audio book) Skewed also written with Professor Keon West. It features my experiences in fashion over the last four decades but through a psychology lens. I also put this info in my lectures when I'm talking to students who make fashion photography.
D: That's such an important conversation and it is a conversation that female photographers have been having. I belong to a group called F22, which is part of the Association of Photographers. Wendy Carrig showed us a study around the fact that 80% of photography students are women but get 20% of the work when they graduate. So the guys are 20% and get 80% of the work. Which creates even more imbalance of male gaze.
D: Of course we need even greater diversity in storytelling. Can you tell us about the work you do with F.A.C.E.
C: Because of the All Walks Beyond the Catwalks campaign (2009-2015), I knew the process and knew what was needed to create a campaigning entity when I joined Fashion and the Arts Creating Equity. F.A.C.E is an organisation that focusses particularly on racism and anti-racist challenge in our Higher Education institutions. I joined it around the time of George Floyd’s murder. Going back to my days of making little magazines, I knew we needed writing and a website and mission statements, all of those things. For F.A.C.E I'm very much behind the scenes. Obviously very vocal about racism when I get the chance, but I've learned a huge amount from F.A.C.E members. They are a grassroots organisation which has attracted educators from higher education, from all over the country.
We have been challenging systemic racism. We've been looking at what used to be called the attainment gap, which puts the onus on the student. We call it the awarding gap, which puts the onus on the institution. Because there's a huge deficit in percentage points between students who are awarded first’s and those who get a lower mark, and obviously it's racialised. We've also been looking at the limited experience that students of colour have in a very white centric, very European environment, (prior to the decolonisation conversations), and the lack of support that they get when educators don't engage or understand cultural narratives and creations. The fear that gives the students if they don't fit in and create European stuff, then their mark will reflect that.
We wanted to create that discussion plus highlight the struggle for Black and Brown educators who were often the lone person in the entire faculty and stress for them to administer to those students who often come with experiences of, daily microaggressions. We are creating a vocabulary to talk about it, about encouraging white educators to talk about race privilege. With that I sit across both groups but am also very involved in the white group in terms of the way that we all turn back round to our universities and insist on accelerated and urgent change, because there's so much lethargy in the system. We are a tiny organisation at the moment, but have linked up with the British Fashion Council, the Council for Higher Education in art and design, and Graduate Fashion Week, big national platforms, and they've all been very receptive to help take forward the normalisation and acknowledgement of our racism as white people.
Lots of us find it find hard to self identify as racist. We say to ourselves ‘But I’m a nice person, so I can't be racist.’ But I think once you get over that barrier and realise that yeah, you are because we all are, and we've not really noticed our privilege. Which we certainly would notice if we had to experience a life full of deficits. That was something my first daughter's father put in front of me 35 years ago. I did what most people felt the need to do back then which was to say, ‘I see you, we're all the same, I don't see colour.’ And he said so clearly to me, ‘well, if you don't see colour then you don't see me, and you don't see the problems I have because of my skin colour.’ That was a really powerful education. It gave me that space to understand.
D: You mentioned how students are made to tow a Western line of how they design, but when we look at mainstream fashion, they readily steal from the very cultures that those students come from.
C: Also, students still need appropriation explained to them, because there isn't yet enough conversation about that in the system. When I was studying, obviously I was looking at graphic design and my favourite graphic designer Saul Bass, but there was no conversation about appropriation at all then. I feel heartened now that we are all looking to discuss identity and to reach further out in terms of recognising lack of understanding and being open to learning. That's one of the great things about having daughters who will say, ‘Oh, no, mum, we don't say that.’ Roseby (daughter number 2) is really up on queer culture and will say ‘No, you’ve just gendered someone there.’
D: Yes. Words matter, don't they? They really matter.
What drives you, Caryn?
C: I like people and I hope for everyone to have the chance to be their best selves, and so many people don't get that chance.
D: And the future? How do you see the future?
C: How do I see the future? Well, I'm very close to seeing retirement, and I do factor that in. I do think there comes a point where it's time to pass the baton, and I'm happy to do that. There are, people out there who are much more advanced and driven than me and this is their turn. That would be that would be one way of saying it.
I am very hopeful that we have a generation of young people who are fired up by injustice because of the direct contact they have through social networking from reports on the ground and in the moment. That social networking has been a huge educator for me because of people speaking about their lived experience. I take a positive view that younger generations are far more educated than we were and are not going to tolerate the bullshit.
Links
Instagram Franklin On Fashion
LinkedIn Caryn Franklin
