Mary Wears What She Wants

"Mary Edwards Walker was a real person, she was a doctor in the USA in the 19th century. She was arrested just for wearing trousers. We don’t really teach and update history properly, but I think it’s important for young people to understand that the things they take for granted had to be fought for, someone else came before them and paved the way. Living in a segmented society, we put a lot of emphasis on young people without understanding that one of the greatest problems we have today is that often the young people don’t have enough respect for the people that came before them, because they haven’t been taught about it properly. And that relates to other areas, and how young people interact with teachers and adults. I work in in the fashion industry and was approached by many people who had a lot of questions and who were not sure about the correct direction to take. So the book came from a need for advice. The main reason behind it was, of course, to prevent exploitation and to ensure that people had a bit of a framework and roadmap because our industry doesn’t have that. When you work in an industry such as the arts, fashion, film or television, you’re in a situation where you’re open to public judgement. So for example, I was in a movie called Star Wars . Some people might look at that and say “well, you weren’t a main character, so therefore you’re not successful”. However, because I had already set my own definition of success, just being on the set to me meant that I reached my personal goal. And if you don’t define your own goals and what success means to you, then you leave yourself open for the rest of the world to interpret what success is. And if you’re in that situation, even when you’ve reached the pinnacle of your career you might still feel like you haven’t achieved enough. So defining success is extremely important. Identifying what your goals are, and setting goals in a chronological order if possible, no matter how crazy they are. I always recommend writing them down and having something that you work towards. Even if you achieve 75% you’ve still achieved a huge amount. I think it’s really important as well to identify what are the roadblocks and hurdles which you may come across. I define hurdles as things that you can get around or get over. And roadblocks are things that you can’t change about yourself. So let’s say you have special abilities, which I like to call it but the rest of the world likes to call it disability, you can’t change that. I was working in fashion, film and television media, and where I was – which was in Edinburgh in Scotland – I found I could get more opportunities if I moved outside of Edinburgh. So I worked in London, I worked in different parts of the world where they were more receptive to my look and to me as a model. So for me location was a hurdle which I could get around. It’s very important to identify your core beliefs as well. For example, you go into an industry and you know what things you’re not willing to compromise on, but you can compromise on other things. Let’s say you’re from a religious background, and you don’t go out to clubs, or you don’t drink alcohol or anything like that, that’s your core beliefs, right? But that might not mean that you couldn’t go into an institution that had a bar, for example. I identified what my core beliefs were at the start of my journey, so it was easy for me to understand how that might potentially affect the course of my career. Or let’s say you’re a makeup artist and you are a vegan, then you know that there are certain companies, products and brands that you can’t work for, that might affect the route that you take, maybe you’re going to invent your own range of vegan brushes, etc. It’s much better if you know what your core beliefs are at the beginning of your career. As a model, if you’ve never thought about what happens if you’re asked to do partially nude or nude or whatever it is, and then you find yourself in that situation, that could be detrimental to you, to your growth, and even to the client you’re working for. Whereas if, for example, going into it you say “I don’t do underwear”, then it means that you know how to focus yourself and position yourself, and your agent and other people know that that’s not what you do. I did a whole chapter on dealing with rejection, because it’s one of those things that nobody talks about in our industry. There’s not a huge focus on mental health, and the arts is an industry where there’s always pressure on your mental health. Not only are you often self employed or running your own business, so you’re not having sick leave, you’re not having all the normal things that an employed person has. On top of that you’re going for opportunities which you might not get. So it’s really important to be prepared for that in advance and to be happy with yourself and have other options, plans B, C and D for what you’re going to do if that doesn’t work out. But at the same time the mentality has to be right, so when you’re going into a casting or interview, do play your favourite music, do have your favourite food as much as you can, anything you can do to lift your spirits. I’ve always been passionate about social justice and equality, those are really important things to me. So I work with a variety of different charities in different positions, usually as patron. They include Adopt an Intern, which is all about getting women who’ve had a career break back into work, also Best Beginnings which looks after infants in difficult situations, as well as CHAS (Children’s Hospice Association Scotland), which looks after terminally ill children, and The Well Foundation, which provides clean drinking water. I am Global Ambassador for Graduate Fashion Week, which is a charity dedicated to supporting graduates within the textile industry to be able to realise new innovations such as sustainable clothing and bring that to market, as well as St Columba’s Hospice, and I also work with Crisis UK. So there are quite a lot of different organisations that I represent and work with. For a long time I worked with Climate Revolution, which is by Vivienne Westwood. I was also working with Fuel Poverty Action to support older people who couldn’t afford to use their heating. I’ve had exhibitions to raise funds for a variety of different charities including Pancreatic Cancer UK, an exhibition with my art gallery at Schroders investment bank. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. I do think it’s really important to use your position to encourage and support charities. Obviously you don’t do charity to receive anything, but at the same time we’re living in a world where young people go on TikTok, they go on Instagram and they see people who are narcissists who do focus only on themselves and they see that that does give success, and that does give significant wealth. So we do need to work out a way as adults where we are championing and – in cases where it’s necessary – compensating those in our community who help other people, because a lot of the time people who are doing that are sacrificing a lot. They’re sacrificing their mental health, their physical health, their financial health when they don’t have a lot, and I think that is a shame. I was running a series over a five year period called Next Generation Regeneration. As part of that, I worked with a variety of different youth groups and young people. Sometimes I mentor them personally, and I run youth groups as well. The work that I do with the V&A is specifically on fashion, textile sustainability. I love doing that. I find that for a lot of young people it really does shape the course of their life because they now realise that they can do what they want to do, and they can still encompass their conscious beliefs. I think sometimes in our education system we tend to focus on really specific disciplines but we’re not learning enough about society and where it is today. But young people are conscious of it, and that’s why you have people like Greta who seem like they are overwhelmed by their passion, but they’re not, they’re actually greatly frustrated by the lack of opportunity for adults and people in positions of power to respond. We have all this technology which we’re constantly updating, but the core things that really make a difference in our lives are not upgraded. There is an argument in the USA about banning critical race theory in school because of the fear that that could cause upset to Caucasian people. But it doesn’t work to write things out of history. What happens is we create a really fragmented society where there’s no trust between generations, whereas we should be trying to encourage a more cohesive and aligned society that goes across religion, ethnicity and gender as well as age. I personally think that the society we live in today segments us into different categories and cultural values. In the West it’s quite normal to be separated along age, whereas where my mum’s from, in West Africa, that’s abnormal. It’s normal to be mixing with all different ages of people and to have your parents living at home until their end of days. Not about these books in particular, but I’m really an egalitarian and I think that there should be more emphasis on fashion for women who want to dress modestly for religious or other reasons. And often when people talk, they are not really aware of the issues that I face as a dark skinned Black woman and the complexities of what I and others have to negotiate on a day to day basis, including traumatic things which are often centred around hair and colourism and skin tone. For example, when you take something that’s a five thousand year old African female tradition of braiding and you reduce it to fashion, that has real life consequences for Black women. Therefore, with feminism for example, you need to look at the intersectionality of race within it. If you go back to suffragism the history books don’t record those Black women who fought for freedom. They record the Black men like Frederick Douglass but they don’t record the Black women. That’s why it’s brilliant now because we have so many more writers to help us to understand these multifaceted issues, and that includes writers of books for children, and it includes books that relate to how we see ourselves and our standards of beauty and fashion."