Emotional ties: Fashion campaigner and presenter Caryn Franklin

Caryn Franklin 

At 14, I asked my female history teacher why we didn’t learn about women and she said, ‘Because women never did anything.’ I knew she was wrong. I bought Rosalind Miles’s The Women’s History of the World in the 1980s and I reread it often.

I wore this platform shoe – sadly the other one is now lost – on the three-mile bike ride to school. I was the eldest of five so fashion was my way of being different. Our school was quite rough; I learned early on that I could use clothes to say, ‘I’m a rule-breaker, don’t mess with me.’

My first job out of art school was at i-D magazine. This issue – number nine – was the first I worked on. I was there for six years. It was an extremely authentic, creative time. It’s where I learned that fashion isn’t just about hemlines but about the politics of identity.

This caricature is from when I started presenting The Clothes Show in 1986. It had 13 million viewers in the UK, so I quickly learned the responsibility of working in the fashion industry. Filming for the mainstream was a challenge, but I came to love it.

My clothes are like old friends. When I wear this jacket I love connecting with the energy of the ‘me’ who bought it 30 years ago – it was vintage even then. Now my daughters wear my clothes, too; they like the stories behind them.

This photograph of my daughters Roseby [left, now 18, with Caryn’s husband, film-maker Ian Denyer] and Mateda [25, with her ex, writer Mandu Saldaan] was taken 16 years ago. It shows how different they are, but they’re both independent and united by shared values.