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Carol Ryder

Liverpool School of Art and Design

Faculty of Arts Professional and Social Studies

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Carol Ryder is a Senior Lecturer in Fashion at Liverpool John Moores University. Trained as a fashion designer, illustrator and educator, Ryder has worked in and around the fashion industry for more than 20 years. She began her career running her own independent fashion label which was sold via her retail outlet in London’s Kensington High Street and exported worldwide.

Currently a PhD candidate, Ryder's practice-based research is concerned with investigating the social impact of narrowly defined and extreme female fashionable bodily ideals and proposes that a more diverse spectrum of fashionable bodies is both possible and necessary.

She seeks to promote greater diversity in fashion and the wider media by using fashion portraiture and illustration to depict a range of faces and figures that challenge the bland homogeneity and repetitious female stereotypes that permeate popular culture, where women and girls are frequently represented as erotic, sexualized, infantilized, vulnerable, submissive or unhappy, in imagery designed to satisfy the dominant male gaze.

Fashion illustration work by Carol Ryder has been published in a range of formats including advertising, books, magazines, journals, online publications and conference proceedings. In 2022, as a finalist in the 6th FIDA International Fashion Illustration Drawing Awards her portrait illustration ‘Clown’ of fashion stylist Lizzie Cardwell was highly commended.

She began to exhibit watercolour fashion portraiture in 2021. Her portrait ‘Gold Stripe’ - of performance artist Silvia Ziranek - was produced during the lockdowns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Gold Stripe’ was exhibited at the 209th Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours exhibition (2021) at the Mall Galleries in London, where it won the Cass Art Prize for Innovative Use of Watercolour.

Since then, Ryder’s work has featured in more exhibitions, including the 211th and 213th Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours exhibitions (2023 and 2025), the ING Discerning Eye exhibition (2022) and the Society of Women Artists 163rd Exhibition 2024 – all at the Mall Galleries in London - and the Royal Cambrian Academy open exhibitions in 2022, 2023 and 2025.

Languages

English

Degrees

2009, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom, MA, Fashion, Textiles and Surface Design
2003, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom, PG Certificate, Education
1985, Northumbria University, United Kingdom, BA Hons

Academic appointments

Fashion Tutor, Fashion Awareness Direct, 2006 - 2012
Senior Lecturer, Fashion, Liverpool John Moores University, 2001 - present

Postgraduate training

PhD, UK, Liverpool John Moores University, 2018 - 2025

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