You then went back to studying alongside a full-time job, and while raising a family. Was that a lot to take on?

Yes! As more senior roles became available, I stopped making art altogether and instead decided to do a doctorate at Oxford University, part-time. I chose to look at changes in higher education and their impact on a subject discipline. It was definitely hard work – it took seven years of my life. Weekends. Holidays. Without the support of my husband, there’s no way I could have done it. I think it was Sheryl Sandberg that said, the most important career decision a person can make is the person they marry and that’s been totally true for me – my husband has always been very supportive of what I’ve done, and encouraging, and I’ve learnt a lot from him about how to take things head on and deal with them when they’re not going OK.

What has been one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your career so far?

Halfway through my doctorate I moved to London Guildhall, which became London Metropolitan University, where I was running the John Cass Department of Art. That was probably the hardest job I’ve ever done because, six weeks after I got there, the university merged with the University of North London, which meant a massive restructuring. I learnt a lot about how not to do things from some of the things going on around me. I learnt what was valuable in a time of big change: staff motivation, keeping people on side, how you hold onto the things you believe in when an institution is changing around you.

You’ve been running London College of Fashion for 11 years. Why did you take the job? What does it entail? And what does a normal day look like?

As part of my doctorate I became very interested in how higher education connected to local communities and industries – as well as what it offered as subject discipline, when the job at LCF came up it was the perfect example of subject matter, to look at how it engages with those things.

I’ve always been interested in clothes and style obviously, but I think what I have brought was not ‘I’m a Chanel expert’, but a passion for creative education and using education to help transform people’s lives, and how we can develop disciplines to support industries. I don’t know how to hem a garment and I don’t need to but I know the framework you need to set up a course – so I make sure we are staffed properly, that research is there, that we are budgeting properly. I might say ‘We need to address sustainability research as a college’. I also ensure we have a big commitment to working with communities – our Making For Change Centre, for example, works with prisons.

There definitely isn’t a typical day-to-day. It’s more: What does a week involve? I start early at 8.30 each day with meetings and finish at 6 with meetings and then often some sort of dinner or private view function, so finish about 8 o’clock. I do that for three days and then on Thursdays finish a bit earlier and come back to where I live, Burford in Oxfordshire. Then, Fridays it’s phone calls, catching up, writing notes, that sort of thing. In London I can’t reflect – I’m in work mode – so it’s nice to be in a different place on Fridays, the sky is different, I can do a bit of exercise, chill out, that’s very important.