Robert Leach
Robert Leach graduated from Kingston University in 198, taught at CSM for many years at Kingston University, and has been with the University of Westminster’s BA Fashion Design course in various roles since 2003; he became Course Leader in August 2024.
A practitioner with a broad range of skills, in 2012, Leach's first book, The Fashion Resource Book: Research for Design, was published, followed in 2014 by The Fashion Resource Book: Men.
In 2015, he curated Archetypes, an exhibition exploring the evolution of archetypal garments, how they inspire the design process and how they become markers in popular culture and society. In 2016, he co-curated The Vanishing Art of Camouflage, the first exhibition based on the Menswear Archive at Westminster, featuring garments with camouflage motifs, prints and designs historically and in a fashion context.
He delivered a presentation at the Dress Devolution II conference on ‘Resort Revellers’ – young men holidaying in Blackpool in the first quarter of the Twentieth century. Photographic representations, primarily in the form of postcards, of their working-class, utilitarian, and functionally dressed selves were juxtaposed with their sartorially flamboyant images. This leisure time self-fashioning emphasises the seaside as liminal space and the locus for fashionable dress practices that provided escape from, and a contrast to their mundane working lives and conditions.
He has a touring pop-up exhibition starting in August 2024, in conjunction with the British Textiles Biennial and Showtown, Blackpool, of cards and images of mill workers travelling to Blackpool for Wakes Weeks. This tradition carried on into the 1970s. Entire towns shut up shops and decamped to the seaside during Wakes Weeks. The exhibition will visit those towns and end up at the same seaside destination - Blackpool. Along the way, it will visit care homes, markets, family festivals and community spaces to gather oral and written memories from the people who have lived and remembered experiences of the British textiles industry and Wakes Weeks to build into an online archive and exhibition to be hosted as part of the Lancashire Textile Gallery website.
As Course Leader, he is immensely proud and acutely aware of the heritage of craft and innovation of the course and the University, but very definitely has one eye on the future, and the possibilities offered by new and emerging technologies.