Lesley Taylor
MA, SFHEA, FRSA

Biography

Lesley is a senior lecturer and department lead for Re:So (The Solent Retail Initiative), Solent's unique store that encourages students and graduates to develop products to retail, promote their ranges and also manage and develop the store as a business. She currently leads and teaches Professional Practice (within art subjects), Worked Based Learning for Fashion and Creative Industries, and Fashion Marketing Principles. She links teaching to Re:So by embedding learning into modules. This results in real world outputs from students on course such as film production, graphic design and fashion management. These have marketing or product-based outcomes.

These links are further embedded in knowledge exchange projects by collaborating with partners such as Chichester College Group, Crawley and Horsham Town Councils where Lesley delivered successful training programmes around independent businesses improvement. Fashion buying students were able to work alongside her as part of their work-based learning module. Currently, Lesley is leading a knowledge exchange project with University of the Arts and Ulster University (Belfast School of Art), both of which have entrepreneurial project stores similar to Re:So. This funded project has given a student the paid role of research assistant across the 15 months the project runs.

Trained as display designer and retail interior designer, Lesley worked in senior visual merchandising management and creative head office roles for department store groups for ten years, then ran her own interior design and styling business for 15 years. While running her business, she taught undergraduate and professional short courses for five years at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins, and on MA programmes at Istituto Marangoni. Through these roles she trained Harrods' personal shopping team and travelled to Barcelona to train Bershka's international team of visual merchandisers.

She has an MA (with distinction) in Interior Design and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Association. She has presented at London fashion retail trade shows such as Pure and Retail Design Expo, academic seminars at UAL and for the Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD), and conferences at Solent and for Advance HE. Lesley has work published by Bloomsbury and Palgrave Macmillan.