Amanda Odlin

Amanda is the Course Leader to BA(Hons) Fashion Design and teaches a number of subjects including fashion design process, fashion illustration, experimental silhouette investigation and traditional pattern cutting methodologies. Amanda is part of the ‘Making Histories Visible’ Research group and has expertise in the textile heritage of Pennine Lancashire, modest dress and stories of migration surrounding the textile industry in Lancashire.

As Course Leader Amanda leads her dedicated team, pushing for change when needed, ensuring all teaching is current and relevant and that students receive the highest standard of education and pastoral care. She is focused on the importance of delivering quality work within demanding time frames and has led her team through both internal and external course review processes. She has been instrumental in working on issues around widening participation, gaining experience of project engagement with hard to reach communities. She has both participated in and organised significant exhibitions through her collaboration with The British Textile Biennial and The Festival Of Making and is a regular member of discussion panels for both events. Through her current role she has experience of working on international competitions, travel bursaries, and regularly creates end of year events having worked on fashion show production for over thirty years. Within her Research role Amanda also has experience writing successful bids and the application processes with two successful Arts Council England bids under her belt.

Amanda is a fashion designer who is passionate about educating and sharing her knowledge to empower younger generations of fashion designers to make a difference. Upon graduation from The University of Central Lancashire in 1988 Amanda moved to Manchester and set up her own label with a studio in the Northern Quarter, which is at the heart of the creative, independent area of Manchester. Amanda gained much experience working on her own label from design and manufacture processes to sales and marketing. Her label, Odlin and Webb, sold to independent stores throughout the UK and Ireland. At this time Amanda was also involved in fashion show production, model casting and event organisation, building up an excellent network of industry contacts. Amanda began to consider moving into teaching as students working with her on placement commented how much they were learning with her hands-on approach. Amanda began teaching at several Colleges around the North-West before finally returning to UCLan in 1996 to begin her teaching career.

At the heart of Amanda’s Research are the human stories that unfold as you converse with people about fashion and textiles. The passion, the memories, the love that people have when you talk to them about the process, their memories and family connections to the textile industry. It is with this ethos that Amanda has led two highly successful Arts Council Funded projects, Hidden Gems and Heirloom which were both exhibited as part of the British Textile Biennial in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Amanda has a keen interest in modest dress and stories of migration surrounding the textile industry in Lancashire. She is passionate about the textile heritage of Pennine Lancashire in particular and this passion has seen her work on Research projects that aim to highlight the amazing wealth of textile history in the region. Hidden Gems, which was a collaboration between UCLan and Gawthorpe Textile Collection, resulted in an exhibition of powerful portraits showing local women and girls from the Asian community, wearing hijabs they designed using fabrics from the Gawthorpe textile collection as inspiration. She presented a full paper on the project along with Co- Researcher, Bev Lamey at the Association of Fashion & Textile Courses (FTC) conference Futurescan 4: Valuing Practice, University of Bolton, UK, 23rd-24th January 2019, also writing a paper for the Valuing Practice publication. Heirloom was the second Arts Council funded project led by Amanda working in collaboration with Queen Street Mill, in Burnley. Heirloom’s key aim was to examine different perspectives and reach out to men who had worked within the textile industry, to share stories, which were then interpreted into intricate, hand embellished designs on unique and highly personal shirts for each participant. The cloth used came from the heritage, steam powered looms at Queen Street Mill, which is the last remaining steam powered weaving mill in the world. The project culminated in a photoshoot capturing the men proudly wearing their heirloom shirts in the surroundings of the heritage mill that created the cloth. The images, stories and shirts were exhibited within the main weaving shed, using mannequins to display the shirts lined centrally in the atmospheric space which connected the exhibition to a fashion catwalk feel. This created a powerful sense of occasion and became one of the main highlights of the Textile Biennial programme of events in 2019. Amanda also lead the team in creating an exhibition catalogue to capture all of the stories, with stunning images of the mill and creative process which became highly sought after and has been recognised as a high-quality outcome.

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