OP-ED: Tamara Cincik, CEO at Fashion Roundtable on Working Class Aspiration, the Creative Industries and the Levelling Up Agenda.
By Tamara Cincik
Working Class Aspiration
Core to my values, and to why we launched Fashion Roundtable, is the painful truth that too many people do not have the opportunity to realise their potential. I have wanted to do as much as I can to help people from what is sometimes euphemistically called "marginalised backgrounds", but which seems to mean many of us. What I did not realise growing up, is that if I was to go into the fashion industry, or to work in politics, I was a rarity. I do not think it should be extraordinary for those like me, who grew up on council estates, to achieve their ambitions.
And yet let's look at the data, such as the Social Mobility Commission's recent Diversity and Inclusion toolkit for the creative industries (which Fashion Roundtable supported by seeking evidence from stakeholders). It highlights that just 32% working as fashion designers are from working class backgrounds, 23% working in advertising and marketing and compare this to the 100 most influential editors 43 having attended fee-paying schools. 32% in the creative industries are working as freelancers, versus 17% of other industries, which as Covid has highlighted escalates job and financial insecurities. How can those who work in policy, or are in leadership roles create successful opportunity roadmaps for those whose lives are so different from their own? If they do not talk like them, think like them, live like them?
Quite clearly being working class, with less access to financial support and alternative incomes, such as trust funds, makes being part of the fashion industry and achieving a leadership role harder than for those from the 7% who attend fee-paying schools. Given the majority of the UK population are from working class backgrounds (49% in 2016), 93% of children do not go to public school, and 3/10 children (and rising) in the UK live in poverty, with links between race, class, ability and economic potential clearly delineated in many reports, including our own Representation and Inclusion in the Fashion Industry (which was a sectoral first), I do not think it should be exceptional to do work you love and to be paid for it.
I grew up on a council estate, my parents were very young when they had me (my English mother was just 19 and my father came from Turkey, where he had started working miles away from his family in Istanbul, aged just 11) and bought a hairdressing salon the week I was born. My great grandmother (we called her Nanny), the brilliantly named Florencia Plested, who had worked as a tailor, match-funded what my Dad had saved while living in a bedsit in Bayswater, as a loan which they of course repaid. The flat I grew up in was in the precinct above the parade of shops where they had their first business. Currently this is being demolished to make way for largely privately sold flats. Like any other child, where we grew up is what we take as the norm and base many of our values on. I certainly never felt left behind and while I knew people who lived in the estate were working class, a key difference as far as I can see between then and now is a system which supported people from all backgrounds more comprehensively. That my parents could even buy a salon and that a flat came with the sale, that zero hour contracts did not exist, that children were taught art as part of the core curriculum, that universities had no fees, and of course that there was no such thing as food banks, is a very different world to today.
I know there was a 3 day week in the early 70's and rising inflation in the 1980's, but what I did not witness on that estate, was children going hungry and families suffering in-work poverty. Something I cannot accept is that in 2022 we have over 2.5m food parcels distributed by the Trussell Trust between March 2020 and April 2021, 980,000 of which went to children.
I believe strongly that every child deserves an opportunity to realise their dreams. Imagine if the next PM, artist or astronaut came from a council estate. We are missing talent, value, and income generation for the wider economy, if those from the 49% of working class children in the UK cannot find clear pathways for successful, meaningful, and creative working lives. It does not sit well with me that I am an exception, not a rule. And yet I know all too often that when I enter a room, someone with my lived experience has not been given a voice, a platform, or an opportunity. I hope this is something we can change with our work.
Fashion Roundtable creates reports, as all too often there is not enough data to highlight our sector's issues and offer solutions. An industry of almost 1m pre-pandemic, deserves more data and, clearly for those from working class backgrounds, more support. Supporting talent pathways means increasing opportunities, and by definition increasing taxable incomes.
If the UK Government's Levelling Up agenda is to really mean something, it has to mean ending child poverty, decent housing for all, and access to leadership work opportunities, no matter where you come from, what your accent is, or who your parents are.
Photo: Tamara and her father Suleyman, in their flat on a council estate called South Oxhey, in the suburbs on London.