By Efstratia Nasioula
London Metropolitan University yesterday hosted the virtual event, Covid and Me: Do We Still care What We Wear?, featuring a distinguished panel talking about their experiences about how Covid has impacted the future of fashion.
Panellist Barry Laden MBE has been associated with retail, fashion and design for over 30 years. In recent years Barry has been a consultant to various businesses, and he is also creating art which he sells virtually through Saatchi’s Online.
He is a Liveryman at the Draper’s Company in the City of London, where he provides advice and help to young students. He also offers financial help to six students from Leek University, in order to help them make their dreams come true.
“I was one of those students who had no help from family, and they are a lot of people like me so we need to be able to help where we can,” Barry said.
Helping emerging designers
He started working in the fashion industry in 1999 because of his sister, who is a designer. From there he had the chance to help hundreds of emerging designers find their workplace.
“I set up a module that was able to really help the designers and allow them to focus on design and for me to deal with the business side,” he says.
This project ran successfully until 2016, when the factory that they were working with had to close. He told students at London Met that paying decent wages is important – but can ruin a business. “We had to close because we could not compete with the illegal goings-on in Leicester,” he said, talking about the “fashion dichotomy”. “We could not make a t-shirt from scratch for less than £10.
“Big companies pay lip service externally though their PRs about how they should behave, but backstage it’s not happening.”
After that, Barry started traveling a lot and he rented a house in Gran Canaria, which is where he took the decision to focus full time on his art pieces. “I am an ideas person, so a channel those ideas to create some different kinds of art,” he says.
Advising students
Barry advises university students to reach out to the brands of companies that they want to work with – and to make it a bit personal .“Do you know what is the first thing I ask someone on a job interview? … What do you know about me?” he says.
“As a small business you can think outside the box and do all sorts of things. Think about where you want to go and what you want to do, so just go for it!”
When it comes to his future plans Barry talked with enthusiasm about his new project on creating art pieces online, “I only started this for about a week…it is all completely new to me and is all fascinating.”
He added that his goal is to motivate students to put themselves out there – and that he is trying to do the same for himself as well.
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