Gill Stark

Gill Stark, Head of the School of Fashion & Design, took up this post in April 2013. Her previous post was as Dean of Fashion and Interim Director of Education at AIU London. Formerly she had worked at other universities, including the London College of Fashion, De Montfort University, Loughborough University and the University of Northampton.

Gill’s background is in Art History, Fashion Design and Fashion Marketing. She has a first class degree from Bretton Hall (University of Leeds) which was a college set in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, specially designed to foster creativity in all of the Arts, and where she studied Art History and Fashion & Textiles. She then went on to complete a postgraduate course at Cranfield School of Management (Cranfield University) where she studied Business and Marketing and business set-up. After this she established a business specialising in luxury lingerie and nightwear, which she ran for some years, whilst also working as a freelance designer for textile companies and lingerie brands. She gained an MA in Design Management and has taught Fashion Design, Fashion Marketing, Fashion Business, Design Management and Cultural and Contextual studies in different universities including the London College of Fashion, where she became a Senior Lecturer and combined part-time lecturing with her work as a freelance designer for some years.

Gill’s research field is fashion, and in particular lingerie and corsetry, and the catwalk show. She is currently completing a book for Bloomsbury about the history, theory and practice of fashion show production, due for publication in January 2016.