After a successful career as a surface textile designer on both sides of the Atlantic todays Inspirational Woman Sharon D Lloyd is now a Face Culturalist. In our interview today we learn how Sharon changed direction to become a force for change within education and the beauty industry. Before social media, beauty and hair was seen somehow as having a secondary, a supporting role within the fashion and movie industry. Social media has changed that perspective which makes its teaching as a subject ever more important. After all the full name for the profession is Hair and Make-up Artist. Recently Sharon has taken on the role of Deputy Director of the Centre for Equity & Inclusion at London Metropolitan University which furthers the work she has been doing within education to highlight the differences academics and students with black and brown faces, face and to create change. Now you can read her incredible journey here.
D: I really love finding out about your past and how it has influenced your whole life, your life choices and how it brought you to where you are now. So usually that starts with where you grew up and your influences of that. I ask everyone the same question at the beginning which is where did you grow up?
S: I grew up in Battersea in London, but I think that's almost a misplaced thing to say because there were very different, areas within the borough. I'm thinking of the street I grew up on when I say this which was full of diverse aspirational people. There was a Ghanian family at the end, there were Irish families around us. Two doors down from us was another Jamaican family. We had neighbours that had lived there all their lives, all through the war and had experienced that, so multi-generational too. I mention that because in those little streets and in that little area of Battersea, to me it felt like a village. I'm very aware that other parts of Battersea didn't have that same sensation at all. Within 4-5 streets, it seemed everyone knew each other and that's rare.
D: And that feels rarer today, doesn’t it?
S: Yes it does. We grew up with that sort of idyllic childhood, playing hopscotch on the streets, there were so few cars around then that you could play cricket and football in the middle of the road and it didn't matter. Your neighbours would come out in the summer and sit on the steps by the front door because they were on holiday. I find it really interesting talking to my husband who's from Liverpool and also working class about this, because they went on holidays. As a first-generation Black British child I grew up with the impression that people like us just didn't go on holiday. It was a big thing to go on vacation, whereas where he grew up it was normal to go on a family break every year. For our holidays, we stayed at home.
My parents are from Jamaica and moved here in the late 50s – the Windrush Generation. Then my uncle followed not long after, my mother's brother. It was mum, dad and uncle, then later on his wife, that was our family. Before he got married, my uncle had a little Mini Countryman, the one with the wood panelling, and he would pile us all into the car to take us to Brighton for the day. That was a holiday for us. I remember sitting in there the first time driving down, being really excited, then being disappointed when we got out and my uncle saying ‘there's the beach’ and it was pebbles. It was really confusing because in my head beaches were made of sand. I've grown to love Brighton Beach now, and I love a good pebble beach, in fact, I probably prefer it in some ways.
D: Did you have any fashion or creative influences when you were growing up?
S: For Fashion it was mum and only mum and not in an intentional way either, it's not like she said ‘I want to inform you.’ In terms of being creative, there was no influence, I was always interested in drawing and painting. If I think about Christmas, when I opened my presents on Christmas day, I would always have a painting by numbers kit, or colouring in books anything to do with drawing or things I could make. I would be so desperate to make things. My brothers would get Meccano kits and other kits where you would have to put things together. I'd be desperate for those too and because I knew my brothers would get bored with them in about 5 minutes, I would sit and wait for them to leave it, so I could put the kits together and paint them and then say ‘tada’ at the end, I loved that. That was it as far as creativity was concerned. It was never really encouraged like that at home apart from those occasions. When I started school, I went to a C of E school. Later mum moved one of my brothers and myself, as we are Catholic, to the Catholic school. I would have been about 8, but I think the influence of the C of E school, which I loved, was that it was run by a bunch of hippies. I think that's what sparked my creativity, that encouragement of trying it and of being imaginative and storytelling. I was very conscious of the fact that when I did go to the Catholic primary school, they shut all that down. I could be creative in the diary I had to write and that was about it. There was no messy play and no experimentation, we didn't go off and create. There was no learning through play it was by rote and while in some ways it suited me, in others I am very aware that it probably squished any creativity. Apart from dressmaking, which was nurtured by Sister Veronica.
In terms of fashion that would be mum. She had the most incredible wardrobe. My mother loved clothes. Growing up, I used to think she looked like one of the members of the singing group, The Three Degrees. She was really glam. She was always very precise about what she wore and how she wore it and she had, like I said, the most glamorous wardrobe, she was amazing. Because I was the only girl she would take me shopping, just the two of us, it was the only time I didn't have to share her. I had a really cool wardrobe as a kid, which I really appreciated. I remember marvelling at the details. One dress was bright red with a Peter Pan collar that was scalloped, and it had Daisy buttons down the front. It was a very specific look mum would dress me in. But as the sister of 4 brothers, I was a tomboy, always climbing fences, always ripping clothes and she would be despairing of another outfit that I'd ruined. But I loved the fact that she loved dressing me up. This is the memory; because now I focus on, with my own research in makeup and hair, she would focus a lot on different ways of doing my hair. Sundays were always washing clothes, going to church, doing Sunday dinner and my hair. It would feel really special when she would hot press my hair so it was dead straight, that was always super exciting. The sizzle. It’s so bad for you now, but the sizzling of the hair as she was straightening it, or she would put it in curls, I felt like a pampered puss. And that's where my love of clothes has absolutely come from. My mum nurtured my creativity through clothes, and she would make clothes too.
D: Did she teach you to make clothes?
S: She did, but not in a deliberate way. I'm very conscious of me, sitting there with a pattern and working it out. I loved going to the library and getting books and finding out for myself and again would go ‘tada’ to mum and she would have said ‘I could have shown you that’. But she never had time in that way.
D: She had a big family to look after.
S: She used to have an old manual Singer machine which she upgraded to an electric Singer machine. And she bought me a portable electric sewing machine, it was metal, and quite heavy. I say portable but it was miniature really, and it was all mine and I absolutely loved that machine and had it for years. Me being practical, I would take it apart, clean it, put it back together again, until finally I couldn't get it working again, I was gutted, as I had carried it around with me for years. Mum also had a carpenter friend make me the most amazing sewing box to carry it around in with my name inlaid in it, it was very special. But once I started moving around as an adult, quite late on in my 20s, I lost lots of things and the sewing box was one of those things, which upset me. I loved the smell of it.
I remember the first time, being independent about what I wanted to wear as opposed to what my mother wanted me to wear. The first inkling of that was being fascinated with a shop in Clapham Junction called Maggie May. It was really radical and had cool clothes, it had always been there. But suddenly I thought I quite like that and was very conscious of being drawn to the shop, but not knowing why. It's the 70s, the Bay City Rollers were cool, and everyone is wearing either platform shoes or really steep wedge shoes. All my friends had them and I remember coveting them. But until the first year in high school mum was still putting ribbons in my hair, that was until my year tutor Sister Catherine wrote home asking her not to, as I was no longer a little girl. My desire was to look like a teenager, all my friends were into The Bay City Rollers with tartan scarfs and or T-shirts but we couldn’t afford any of that. Mum spent her money wisely and on practical things, anything that was trend led would have been really frivolous to her. Eventually I went on a school trip where we're allowed to wear our own clothes and I convinced her to buy me wedge shoes. Two things happened; the first thing, I was very conscious that it was the end of the trend for wedge shoes. The second thing was that they were really uncomfortable. I think I wore them a few more times and then never wore them again because they were so uncomfortable, I became a Clarks soft shoe girl after that. I was 11 and incredibly impressionable, everyone’s lives revolved around TV. Teen girl magazines were just starting up. My visual impressions were newspapers and you didn't see clothes there, Top of the Pops and other popular TV programmes of the time were the influences. I remember falling in love with a series called Rock Follies. Clearly my leaning towards being a feminist started early as Rock Follies was about a girl rock band and how they developed, and how their careers were swerved by the interests of different people. Also the ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ with Geraldine McEwen. I think I was very observant of what she was wearing or what they were all wearing with this idea of 1930s costuming and what it did for the various characters. I loved my school uniform in some respects. I loved the fact it had a beret a V-neck jumper, a shirt and tie with a variety of either box pleat or A-line swishy skirts and I loved the jacket. We had a green trench coat too. I loved my green trench coat buttoned with my beret. Altogether it was very much, a 50s look. There are always one or two iconic periods in our lives that we feel most comfortable with, and as adults, how much do we veer away from that? Talking to my friends about this recently, I looked down and I saw myself wearing a linen shirt buttoned up with a with a bow tie and a V-neck jumper, with jeans, and I had my trench coat with me and my beret was in my bag. I think that there was that moment as a young girl, preteens, where I felt very secure, which is why I go back to that that look every so often.
Then of course the 70s hit, and it's disco. My eldest brother, Bruce, was always out partying and he would come back and regale us with tales of what he did and what people were wearing and we would sit on the stairs listening to it all and be really excited about it. He started going to second hand shops to buy wild Hawaiian shirts to wear to these discos, which disgusted mum. It was the idea of going to second hand shops that she saw as a parental fail. I remember him coming back and telling us he'd met Disco Diva Sylvester in a club and what they were wearing and meeting Ian Dury and what he was wearing. Amazing. I couldn't wait to grow up. Interestingly enough though I felt I was the odd bird in my family. My brother loved disco and my other brothers, one of them loved Reggae and Dub. For another it was something else but none of that was me. Then of course Punk came along and I thought well that's interesting and then New Wave. I'm not saying that's the personas I adopted, but I recognised that I could have lots of different personas. The purity of Top of the Pops each week was that you could see what different groups were wearing and you could adopt those looks. One week I could like a New Romantic another Ska would be the influence or pop and RaRa skirts. It was cultural play with musical influenced looks.
D: You said earlier that your education was structured. How did you then go on and study Fashion and Textiles?
S: I went to Chelsea School of Art to study Fashion and Textiles. At Chelsea they didn't have a degree course, it was a two year HND. I started off studying knitwear but by Christmas of the second year I was miserable because I felt my knitwear tutor hated me. I'm a real people pleaser and couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, she hated everything I did, hated my ideas, and I felt like I was constantly missing something in the learning. It was so frustrating.
Then one day the Head of Textiles, Peter Pilgrim asked ‘what are you doing?’ We got talking and I said ‘I'm not happy.’ He asked to see my work and asked ‘are you really a knitwear person?’ The answer was ‘no.’ ‘Right’, he said, ‘I'm going to move you across to textile print,’ because all my sketchbooks were full of drawings and experimentations with colour and layering of colour because that’s what I was interested in.
Looking back for me it was about surfaces and not about the manufacture of creative shapes, though I still have an appreciation for a good knit. Moving over to printmaking, something clicked and I exploded with ideas. I spent a month in the V&A in the Persian section and came back with ideas inspired by Persian armoury and illustrations of little soldiers with bows and arrows flying across the page. After college I managed to get space in a shared studio in Old Street, East London, it was really super cool and I worked from there as a freelance designer for several years.
D: It's amazing how meetings like that will change everything for you, because I had a meeting like that too, which took me into photography.
S: Years later, I got into teaching. At one of the Higher Education institutions I began teaching at I taught fashion theory not textile theory. I would teach fashion students but would have to teach graphics students too. They threw lots of different lectures and specialisms at me that I had to deliver.
A year, two years into the job, they decided to set up a Hair & Makeup degree.
Ours was one of the first degrees in the country in makeup and hair. Over time we developed it, honed it and made changes so it's very different today. That development of the course was really exciting, we had lots of great ideas, some of them worked, some didn't. That comes from breaking new ground and building something. I remember being on the train once meeting up with an academic I used to work with and he asked ‘what are you doing now?’ I said ‘I teach on the makeup and hair course.’ His reply, ‘huh that's not a real degree.’ My answer was ‘I beg to differ’ and told him off. It was always my mission to prove it is a real degree, and to have everyone acknowledge that it isn't made-up or frivolous.
D: It's a very important part of the fashion industry because without good hair and makeup artists, you do not have a shoot or the movie business, because you need special effects. We hear about actors who sit for hours in hair and makeup so that they can become a character. If you do not have that you do not have movies, you do not have theatre, you do not have fashion shoots, you do not have runway shows.
S: The thing we can see now, with the explosion of social media suddenly everyone's looking at everyone else and in a much more intense way. So lots of things happened at the same time, where lots of people realised the importance of how they present themselves on screen or in person.
D: As you know, there's a huge environmental impact from the beauty industry like the fashion industry, because they are both very reliant on plastic. It’s more obvious in the beauty industry than in fashion because in fashion it's hidden, it's in your clothing, you are not necessarily aware of it. Whereas in beauty you can see it in all the packaging used.
You are a beauty futurist. What's a beauty futurist?
S: A beauty futurist is someone that thinks about, how we wish to present ourselves. I think it's really interesting when we think about beauty, I think we are so stuck on this historical perspective of what beauty is. We rely on the known. Whereas with so many other areas of design there's a freedom in thinking about investigating the impossible. Beauty has not had this critical mass of theorists looking at it. It's still at the very beginning of what it could potentially be in understanding cosmetic ideals. In addition, a lot of those ideals are patriarchal and westernised. Well, we are taught that they are westernised, but in reality when we look further afield we can see so many other influences. As a beauty futurist, it is about taking off those shutters and understanding how we first presented ourselves. It's more than what forms of media has, for the last 100 years, presented up to us as women, mainly women, as how we should be seen. Being a Beauty Futurist is about giving us the tools and the language to move beyond the function of the aesthetics and that will ultimately be freeing. What that freedom is, is up to the individual. Whether it is about having more cosmetics applied to us or being more selective about what's used on our skin, or even choosing no cosmetics. But the interesting thing is that we have choice.
What we're dealing with now, seeing virtual reality in play, is the potential. Rather than wait for things to slowly evolve, it's an opportunity to leapfrog all expectations of what beauty ideals are and reboot them.
I work alongside another beauty futurist called Alex Box and we have a very particular take on where AI could be taking us. There are other people out there talking about it too. Once we get rid of this idea that it is gendered, that it is frivolous, that it's seen as something that doesn't have impact. Once we remove those negative patriarchal connotations, we will move into a new era of really appreciating what it can do, not only for our visual appreciation, but also for our well-being. I think to dismiss the importance of looking after oneself, is bizarre.
D: The self will always remain whether there is AI or not.
S: There you go.
As an aside, one of the things I think is really interesting is when people say, ‘why, are you approaching your ideas like this?’ I think it's because I was a textile designer. I'm applying all the crazy and interesting ideas I had in terms of textile development, in surface colour and applying it, it's the same approach. I am only applying it using different surfaces and different materials.
D: You touched on how beauty is seen from a western ideal. As we know, fashion steals from other cultures. How does this impact on the beauty industry culturally, and what does the impact of Western beauty ideals have on black, brown and Eastern people and how does that feed into education?
S: I think in terms of beauty and race, unlike, fashion, which has been about adopting so many aspects of other cultures. Beauty does the opposite, it has denied. It has taken away. And it's been that consistent denial that has been so debilitating. Because it's the denial of the self. While we can be critical and we talked about sustainability; in many ways, while beauty is looking at sustainability that levy of blame is mainly at the door of fashion. I think within the next 100 years if we can put our heads round it, we can resolve sustainability. This in terms of the debilitating of the self is going to take more than 100 years, because it's been generational harm.
When I talk about changing the language around beauty ideals it is an attempt to resolve that generational harm. problem with language is that it's so harmful. One of the things I'm arguing about in the article and writing about is the way that beauty companies, refer to black skin as darker, it’s not darker, you can say browner. They go round and round and round in circles, they say deeper, they won't say browner. There are a lot of discussions about this in the industry that say, it should be deeper skin tones. But what does that mean? We still have a lot to unpack.
I wrote an article called ‘Black Girls Don't Blush’ because they do. What we're all guilty of is not properly observing black skins. Because there are so many images that are overwhelmingly white and youthful. There is no room within many visual interpretations of bodies for properly observing what black skin looks like in different states of being. It's like anything, if you haven't got your eye in you are never going to see it.
D: You're the co-founder of F.A.C.E Fashion Academics Creating Equality tell us what you are doing there to elevate teachers and students.
S: I had been involved in several projects at my previous university where we looked at the awarding gap. Even my own Black students weren't succeeding in the way that I wanted them to, and I kept thinking ‘What's going on here? Why? Why?’ and ‘Why am I failing them?’
Then I began to realise that it's actually about the student experience. How they feel that they can succeed. What we deliver in front of all the students, lands very differently to a Black student if they are the only minoritised person in the room. There's no discussion about their lived experience, their heritage. They never get to talk about deeper (browner) skin tones. They never talk about Afro hair textures. Which means they are always going to be othered. When I stepped into the role of Course Leader, I made it my business to have a much more equitable experience for students by firstly employing a black technical instructor to teach makeup and hair. You do these things bit by bit because if you do it all at once, it's too radical for people and it frightens them. Then we changed the products in the kit, then we changed the language throughout the modules. We didn’t do it all at once because we were evolving too. We were trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work and then we began to have those conversations with students, about the why?
Then the pandemic hit, and the death of George Floyd. I was contacted by an ex-colleague and we discussed how bereft we felt in our institutions.’ At that point, we began to have those bigger discussions with Black fashion creatives and Black fashion academics. At the same time having those conversations with other academics that were also going through the same thing was; ultimately it made me really brave. I think that the remit of F.A.C.E is to extend that bravery amongst other Black and Brown academics and our Black and Brown students.
D: Last year you were named a Champion for Change by Vogue. Has that helped elevate the messaging?
S:
Not really, I think people now recognise that I am quite serious about it. But
has it made anything that we're doing more actionable? No. No. And it's by
sheer force of will that I'm still knocking on doors saying can we talk? We
need to talk about this issue.
What I want to see is real change. Not only words. I want action. I gave a talk at the Royal College of Art last year, when preparing for it I realised that we're still playing with the same toys that are in the box. So instead, I led a discussion about decentring our delivery of knowledge. Which is quite radical for so many people, challenging this white centred patriarchal approach as the beginning of everything, the centre of everything, and to take other approaches. You can see people thinking, can we do that? Yeah, you can. You don't have to start ‘the history of' at any particular point, but the problem then becomes, what do we start with? I'm at that point now, of, where do we begin?
D: So that's what's moving you forward to create change in the future.
S: I'm on a bit of a fact-finding mission at the moment. I did a wonderful conference at Oxford University a few years ago where I suddenly realised, we don't have to stand there and read a paper out loud. A conference presentation could be poetry or a performance. Which at the time I thought was so enlightening. In fact as a consequence I ended up putting my makeup on in front of everyone, while I read my paper. The point I was trying to make was that we should be querying how we are informed by what cosmetic ideals are.
D: Brilliant, that was a great idea.
S: I was emboldened by seeing everyone else in that space. What we want to do by decentring is take how we even acquire knowledge out of its known space. If we're going to change this education system which is failing many of our minoritised learners, we have to find other ways, of delivering knowledge.
D: How do you see the future?
S: I'm a really positive person so I see the future as a way where we begin to adopt more equitable practises in how we engage with each other, culturally. The way I see the future is one where we think about education and knowledge acquisition as a long term process. I think one of the problems that we have with education is that the system is built where we do the learning, primary, secondary, further education, higher education, postgrad, you're done. But what we need to be thinking about is lifelong learning. It's quite radical to think where we stagger those points, where we stop and we acquire knowledge.
The future for me, it's really exciting because, I like change, even change for change sake because it feels like we're moving on, we're living, we're evolving. That's how I like to see the future.
Links
Instagram : Face Culturalist
LinkedIn : Sharon D Lloyd
