“ Not being represented and seeing people who look like you and not seeing relatable stories to yours being told, can leave you feeling like an outsider looking in”
( Shazad 2020)
“Equality, diversity and inclusion are critical to everything we do at University of the Arts London.” (UAL Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Report 2024 )
I am a white, female freelance designer for set and costume alongside my part time work as a lecturer at the London College of Fashion at UAL.
My practice informs my teaching and vice-versa, and the idea for this intervention was conceived in the intersection between these two identities. The experiences I have had of working with differently abled actors and in theatres that focus on access inspired me to interrogate my own practice. I have been looking for ways to improve access to, and representation in, my work – including in the research materials and images I use to communicate designs for diverse characters.
Similarly, my department at UAL has been seeking for many years to decolonise its teaching materials and become more representative of our diverse student body. I vividly remember hearing Duna Sabri report on her findings after concluding her 4-year study on the causes that underlie inequality in students’ attainment. She identified a few promising sites of intervention including:
“ engagement with industry as a means of developing practitioner identities and improving attainment particularly for disadvantaged groups.”
And
“Inclusive curriculum: attending to both the substantive content of curricula and to the support of students’ self-directed projects”
( Sabri 2017)
I hope this intervention touches on both of these areas. She also spoke about how crucial it was that students saw themselves represented within teaching materials
“ Recognition is the engine of identity formation (Honneth 1996) and creative arts students’ identities are profoundly intrinsic to their practice.”
( Sabri 2017)
Representation and visibility clearly matter deeply, in terms of our wider culture, the performance industry, our classroom environments and teaching materials.
As costume and make up designers my students will be creating and conceiving the characters that tell our collective stories across a wide range of media. They need to prepare for a multi-cultural industry that should value equal representation and find their practitioner identity in amongst that. Their training environment needs to model best practice, making students of all kinds and backgrounds feel enabled, included and seen.
“Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation.”
( Gerbner, Gross 1976)
It is vital that our students understand how potent their work could be in shaping society, a stated aim in UAL’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Report 2024. It hoped that UAL students would be
” be champions of equality, diversity and inclusion wherever they go “ (UAL 2024)
We all have a responsibility to own what power we have to represent diverse voices and uphold anti-racist and inclusive practices that create a fairer more equitable society for all. Recognising our power and the ways we can make a difference can be exhilarating. UAL gained Race Equality Charter Bronze Award in December 2024, which while admirable, shows there is room to improve.
The focus of both courses in our department, the student’s canvas and point of collaboration, is the actor’s body. As we train our students to work equitably, I am frustrated by the logistical and financial constraints we must navigate to bring a range of diverse actors into the classroom. Often, when the actor is not available, designers might use photographs of them as reference to draw from, to keep in mind the reality of the body that will become our characters. By evolving a physical image library of diverse figures for students and staff to use for reference or teaching material, I want to ensure that the images of these bodies we use are as representative as possible.
Can teaching with a diverse range of body reference images help students cultivate an open minded and diverse approach to character creation?
I hope that broader representation in the student’s costume drawings and make-up looks results. I have noticed a predominance of what I would call “fashion bodies”: thin, elongated and predominantly white in students work. A visual default that speaks of a dominant visual culture for bodies that has been written about in many ways and that I would like to disrupt. Drawing and visual communication is central to the design process so if the reference for those drawings is varied and diverse then hopefully it follows that the work will be too.
The fundamental nature of this resource hasn’t changed since its conception as part of the Inclusive Practices Unit. However, the research I have undertaken, and the feedback I have had from my peers, students, colleagues and industry collaborators has presented so many new possibilities as well as a vital awareness of the privilege and tensions in being a practitioner researcher looking for active and equitable participation ( Linette 2024)
These possibilities include:
- A resource that can prompt discussion around representation
- A resource that signposts to other image collections that are representative
- A resource that can evolve, co-created by student and staff either informally or in sessions that focus on research methods which produce diversity
- A resource with variants that can reflect the visual reference needs of different programmes – for example, portraits for the hair and make-up students
- A resource that inspires critical analysis of visual norms
- A resource that can inspire discussions on practitioner identity
- A resource that evidences and re-enforces an underlying course culture that values diverse communities of actors, performance makers, teachers and students
