5 Minutes With Caryn Franklin

Caryn Franklin was the Fashion Editor and Co-Editor of i-D Magazine. A broadcaster, writer, director and producer, she has worked with many major networks to produce TV shows and documentaries, as well as contributing to newspapers and magazines. This included BBC's The Clothes Show which ran for 12-years from 1986-98.

As a fashion activist, she has co-chaired Fashion Targets Breast Cancer for 15 years, which has helped build and maintain Britain's first ever Breast Cancer Research Centre.

Caryn also co-founded the award winning All Walks Beyond the Catwalk (with Debra Bourne and Erin O'Connor) a ground breaking initiative promoting diverse beauty ideals. All Walks is collaborating with colleges nationwide to add the concept of emotionally considerate design and diversity to the curriculum.
Also proposing the All Walks Centre of Diversity at Edinburgh College of Art, which was launched at Graduate Fashion Week in June 2011, attended by Govt. Minister Lynne Featherstone.

Q1. What was the first record that you bought and did it change your life?

First Album Innervisions by Stevie Wonder. I turned from a sports obsessed adolescent into a dreamer

Q2. Where do you and your co-founders find the inspiration to create All Walks Beyond The Catwalk?

Creating All Walks was just a labour of love. We sat round Debra's kitchen table and tried to work out how to tackle something we all felt passionate about. We had a tiny bit of funding to profile emerging designers at London Fashion Week so that dictated things somewhat.

Q3. Would you say that today's emerging fashion designers are into it more for a career or is there still a love for pure
design?

Today's emerging designers are under enormous pressure to be glossy and slick not just with their design but also their production, their media profile, their whole operation. There is barely any room to make mistakes or to grow organically and carefully.

Q4. As the former Fashion Editor and Co-Editor of i-D Magazine you were responsible for establishing and nurturing many influential subcultures over the past few decades. Do you think that the online world is destroying print media and therefore making the cycle too fast for anything substantial to develop?

Online provides a different energy and when it's used to promote information that can benefit those in the chain of receivership, there is nothing more effective. All Walks has really benefited from online promotion. We have been invited to talk at colleges because students have facebooked us.

I think the style of online offers a different energy too. It took me ages to master that because i was too busy writing report style. Now I find I do like the pace of personal online accounts and opinions just as much.

Q5. You have worked with some pretty high profile people so far in your career. Can you give a me really funny anecdote/story about one you have worked with?

Terrible memory so having to think...There was a certain TV producer who regularly drunk. The entire production crew were staying at a swanky hotel and we felt we had done out caretaking for the night by tucking her up in bed at the end of the evening. We were woken early by hotel staff to collect her naked and asleep from the foyer the next morning. Her story was that she had got up to go to the loo and opened the wrong door. Finding herself locked out of her bedroom she drunkenly took the lift to ask for help but passed out in it.

We know differently and think she shouldn't have tired to seduce one of the male models along the corridor.

http://www.howtolookgood.com/

http://allwalks.org/



Stevie Wonder - Living for the city 1974