An Interview With Kerry Wilde
Kerry, Kerry Wilde, tell me about yourself.
I am a personal soul stylist, and I'm a brand consultant, specializing in the empowerment of women,in the world. Having been through so many different beautiful experiences of life, encompassing intensity and joy and all the expressions of life in-between, it has really brought me to this work of Soul Style.
Tell me what a soul stylist is. Tell me what a soul stylist does, and tell me how a soul stylist makes people feel.
I was searching for somebody that was going to unite the worlds of wellbeing, healing, soulful expression, spirituality and align them with fashion. style, presentation and outer appearance. Being in spiritual worlds for many years, and belonging to different lineages where clothing was almost an ego concept. I had to do a lot of the dissolve-ment of ego, I felt that my relationship with beauty and style and fashion had become disconnected. I was sitting in meditation one day and I really felt the words, "You are the art. You are the art." And the word Adornment came in.
Adornment to me is spirit made into matter. It's actually a soul expression of who you are. Apart from the persona created that might be performative. It is really your natural outer embodiment. I work with women in online courses, events and 121. I guide in a way that allows them to disconnect and release from the conditioning that we have around body image, fashion and self-expression. The way fashion has been dictated to us and not through us. I allow the women to really come into a sense of connection with who they are and how they wish to be seen.
I’m going to start at the beginning, but uniting, wellbeing, and the alignment of wellbeing and healing with fashion... That's a really interesting area to talk about, then so too, this lineage that you talked about. And actually, the whole idea of clothing as an ego concept. I always talked about going clothes shopping as an anti-depressant. We've changed what we want and get from clothes, to such a degree. We just use them to paper over the cracks of our lives. And they can be fundamental building blocks, rather than veneer and I'm really interested in that relationship. And then I like this whole idea of adornment, the spirit made into matter. And then I really want to get onto the whole issue of body image. There are loads of questions I have for you Kerry. But first, tell me what your childhood tasted like, tell me what it smelled like, and tell me what it sounded like.
It tasted like, let me think about this, because there are many flavors. If I can think of two major flavours. I've got an Irish Jamaican background, so I have two quite different things playing out here. I've got a jerk chicken, rice and peas combination going on in my mouth, and I've also got a Findus crispy pancake hanging out of the other side. So for me, it really tasted of these two cultures coming together. One of them was kind of like an Irish gypsy family that I was from and the patriarch of that lineage was my mom's dad. And he was a jazz pianist. So when we go on to what it sounded like... My uncle was in The Specials. So I grew up listening to The Specials but also they had a pirate radio show, it had all of The Specials, Fun Boy Three, all that stuff. I was kind of a bit of a groupie at the beginning going to Top Of The Pops as a three year old. So in one ear, I had this Ska and reggae influence - my mom had me at 21 and she was into Roots Reggae and then in the other ear, my grandad was a jazz pianist, so think Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan etc. He was from Ireland, and descended down to Coventry through Liverpool and thats where he grew up. He worked for Rolls Royce making jet engines. I grew up in Coventry too, in a working class area.
So in terms of taste, we've got crispy pancakes and jerk chicken. What a combination. And the sounds too, a great mix of music.What about the smells of your childhood?
I think of dressing up and style when i think of smells. That fascination for me started really early on. My childhood smelled like the perfumes that were on my grandma's dressing table. So it would have been things like Lancome products and Oil of ulay, and I just remember the smell of the powder puffs. So the smells were anything that I was not really allowed to touch! I would be secretly opening those jars of many lotions and potions! She'd make rose perfume, which we had to keep on the side for a long time. I marvelled at the process of collecting the petals and making my own, she was a bit of a kitchen witch! So I grew up around that - lots of 1950/s grooming and medicines for everything!
Dressing up began as I started dancing as a young girl. I was on the stage from three,which meant that dance was my expression of choice.Iit was like an embodiment practice for me. There was lots of movement going on with my Nan dying and moving houses but I was happy. I was in a dreamworld. It was a bit of an imaginary field of awareness. I would see things moving on the walls. I would see colors. Lots of spirit used to come through my room and it was like I was in the ether realm quite a lot.
I'm super interested to know a bit more about your dancing. You talk about dancing as a release from family, what did you mean by that?
I came from a broken home. When I was 18 months old, my mum and dad split and I grew up as a woman of colour in a White family. There was a broken home theme going on throughout my life but in those early years, I think finding my own identity as a child of color in a predominantly White area like Coventry really was my work.
In my school in the 80s, there were a small amount of people of colour in my year. There was a lot of racism, and unconscious racism that I now know to be systemic. It’s only really in the last few years that I have fully started to untangle and dive deeper into those experiences.
really believe that dance was a way of coming home to myself and way to feel pleasure, joy, beauty and celebration. The cornerstone of what it meant to be an inner soul expressing and being rather than being judged for anything else. Dancing for me, was and is a healing chamber.
How did you morph from there into being who you are now? When did you find yourself?
My wounding was to wanting to ‘fit in’ and to belong to my tribe. My difference, uniqueness was a part of me I dimmed down and only truly started to explore when I left Coventry and moved to Nottingham in the 90’s!
When I think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, definitely, love and belonging was my top need on the list, but how was I going to be able to fit in? Who was going to adopt me into their tribe? The fragmented sense I felt from having brown skin meant that clothing was a vehicle to reclaim my identity or to actually become a new character. At university I studied people like Cindy Sherman. I went to art school and I started studying photography, sculpture, textiles and Fine Art. I think studying people that were really dismantling identity was a passion. Cindy Sherman was an amazing inspiration, how she talks about her process of ‘inner acting’; I really resonated with that. I did so much inner acting in my life to belong to the tribe I was in. We all do. That's our human condition, we want to belong to a community, but I think that can bring up a lot of questions around self esteem. How much are you going to let go of yourself to belong to that tribe?
I studied fashion and then I went into a career in the industry, and I worked in the corporate world in London. It got to a point where I felt like I'd worn so many masks to perform for the tribe I was in, whichever collective that was at the time, that this mask just started to crack and shuffle on the face. That fragmentation started to happen within my face. It was telling how I was really feeling and what I was saying didn't match and people were questioning me and I was like, "No, no, no. I want to still be that person." And the mask, for me, I think of it as a latex mask sliding down the face. I just couldn't wear those roles, responsibilities, the culture, how they defined me as a Brown-skinned woman, as a mother, as a wife. All of these masks that I was wearing. I actually hit a burnout, which I call a spiritual awakening, back in 2011. That was the point where I just couldn’t continue. How it showed up in my system was physical. I've studied lots of different holistic practices in Reiki and in the Kundalini lineage, we talk about the 10 bodies and we talk about auras and we say that any distortion comes into the outer aura first. It happens in the energy frequency. So when I hit this burnout in my corporate career, actually it showed up in a physical way. I had an illness called Labyrinthitis. This meant that I had this inner ear disorder, which meant that the whole room would spiral. I was sick at work. I had to be off work for six months. And what that led to was a real dismantling of the masks that I was wearing and how those identities that were formulated through clothing, but also persona, actually were stopping me from being who I was. Stopping me from really existing in the here and now. It was a breaking away from the culture. A breaking away from what I was taught and told. Breaking away from conditioning. At the time I felt enormous guilt for not being part of this capitalist dream anymore. I felt enormous guilt for not being a perfect wife, or a perfect mother, and there's a big healing process to that.
How did you change your life in order to reclaim it?
It was a real inner journey. I think with the Labyrinthitis, I didn't realize the symbology of the labyrinth and what that meant at the time. I was just very annoyed that I couldn't get back in my car and drive to work and continue this nine-to-five life. But it wasn't a nine to five. It was more like an eight-to-ten. I was on all the time, and I was traveling the world globally to look at factories within the fast fashion world. I had a two-year-old at home. I had a laptop, I had a mobile phone and I was Skyping from Bangladesh and trying to talk to my two-year old through the screen, and then I was planning these big trips to go assess the factories. Seeing the devastation in the fashion world, as well as managing this "capitalist dream", managing the responsibilities that women have to manage in this day and age, which is what feminism really fought for, but in the end the burnout and the amount of heaviness that that brings, holding it all together.
Do we want it all? I don't know if we can have it all. And what is it all anyway? I certainly don’t want it all. It sacrifices a lot to do with mental health and to do with your body and your wellbeing, when you have it all. So from that experience, I then started to practice a lot of yoga. I went into training in yoga and teaching yoga and really left that corporate scene behind. I started a wellbeing company back in 2012, where we had life coaches and nutritionists and we worked together to really empower people in our community. Then from there, it was about four years ago, I sat in meditation and the word adornment came in. I realized I'd been hiding in a kind of mom uniform, that I call it. Which is kind of neutral colors, soft, blending in. And then I realized, I am a queen. I'm a royal being on this planet, and I've done so much inner work, and sort of like a shamanic journey to get myself to a point of feeling really powerful. Which was all about womb healing, really feminine embodiment practices.
When did you stop dancing?
Well, I broke my ankle at 10. Actually this week I had a call with an amazing anatomy guy, and I realised I’ve always been misaligned, and it all comes from this breakage I had. In the '80s, they slapped a plaster on and kind of said, "She's fine." and I got on with it. I stopped dancing because I couldn't do the splits. I couldn't do the things that I could do before, so I stopped around 11. But then, I started to rave when I got older. So I guess I did keep dancing in some respects.
You don't need to do the splits to dance, Kerry. I once defined myself as not creative because I couldn't draw. There are many other ways of being creative than drawing.
It's funny about the definition of creativity, isn't it? How we can think it's not for us and really it's a naturally arising energy that comes and it's just about attuning to that. When I started dancing again, it really unlocked something in me. If we think about the way that we move, we’re often walking forwards or sitting, and generally we don’t twist. But moving in an embodied way and listening to the body can allow the wisdom to come through. So what was happening was I was doing a lot of dance and then journaling, crying, screaming, being primal, being on my yoga mat. I was a yoga teacher, but I’d been taught by a man. And I realised my woman's body wanted to move in a different way. And so I started exploring what it meant to be feminine. What it meant to have feminine energy running through me. Connecting to the earth, connecting to my cycles, connecting to my body, has been like a semantic process and it's been an unlocking of what was stuck and also, a release of trauma that was trapped.
How did your friends and partner respond when you went through this change?
When I first started to hit burnout and the mask started to run down my face, I lost a lot of friends. Because I wasn't performing as this character, Kerry, anymore. My wild feminine, I want to call it. Yeah, my wild feminine, or the force of nature that I am started to come through, which is raw. Sometimes it's a lot more raw than people are ready for.
You have to go through a process of allowing the nervous system to meet the edges, to receive the feedback from who is around you. It led to a divorce. It led to a breakdown of my marriage and a complete separation. I could no longer belong to the old me. I actually had to die. Stephen Hawkins wrote a book about dying, and living through dying in your own life. I really believe that a part of our spiritual practice is this dissolvement of the pretense, of the ego self, but also really, I died. I went through what people on the outside called hell, because my whole life crumbled. Loss of houses, loss of dogs, loss of everything I had known. From the outside, it looked horrible. But on the inside there was this sense of homecoming. There was a sense of, "Wow, I'm returning to something so natural." I had to do a lot of sitting on rocks, hugging trees, communicating with the earth again, and making sure my inner child was allowed to be heard through that process.
The rebirth, I think, was allowing my inner child to be reborn in a sense, to be heard. I started to listen to her, and that was when the dance came in. And she wanted to play with clothing. She wanted to dress for joy and celebration, her expression and her vitality, which was the initial life force energy that I came in with, could now be here, be present.
Was there a consciousness to that? Did you consciously cradle and protect and then release that inner girl, young woman? And if so, how were you led through that?
I did all of this stuff on my own and I made my home like a quiet sanctuary. I did a lot of it very intuitively. It was what I call the quiet work. When nobody's watching, there's no performance. You're literally in it and that was the most transformative work. When I initiated it with myself, I held myself in that process. Guides, healers, psychotherapists are amazing and I've got millions of them in my life that help me and have helped me. But those moments when you self-initiate and you choose, you realise you need to walk this dark, gritty, lonely forest path on my own, because no one else is going to do it for you.
I did a lot of meditation. I'd released a lot of substances; alcohol, caffeine. I'd done a lot of detoxing. I felt really clear and clean and I was moving, I was really taking care of myself, and then I started to really just listen. Listen to what the next prompt was. What to do next. I did have coaches that would open a doorway for me, but I couldn't afford to keep going with some of these coaches. Coaches and healers are amazing and they're worth their weight in gold, because we need guidance. I really strongly advise that, and then at the same time, it's almost like being handed a key, and then it's up to you to open the door. And sometimes I opened the door, and I was like, "Okay, I need to be in this." I really just listened and allowed that intelligence to kind of lead me.
I had to really save, because my career was in garment technology. So I'm kind of like the architect in between the designer and the buyer to make the product happen and take that into production. So it's the first concept to production, and I'm the one that manages that process. Fabrics, size specs, fitting on models and really bringing in all that quality side of things together. When I was doing this work, I got a part time job that was going to pay bills and then I taught. At the same time as my own healing, I ended up teaching women's circles and learning through that process of just being in circle with other women and listening to other women's stories. Just hearing and being able to express what was really going on was such a huge part of just feeling more stable in my mental health. It's quite simple, just being in a circle. It's how tribes live and it's in our ancestry. It's in our DNA, to actually be in communion with others. It's so important to listen to others, and to rebalance our own biases within us.
I love this, the transition's amazing. It takes you to this description of a personal soul stylist. That bit I kind of understand now. Kind of coach, kind of helping people design their transition. And then a brand consultant as well. Is that in the traditional sense? Or is that a soulful brand consultant? How does that bit manifest?
Yeah, so it's bringing all of my technical expertise within the fashion industry. I find a lot of sustainable brands start off with high hopes and with great mission statements and then it's really the nitty gritty of that production process that they're not so sure about, so that's where my expertise comes in. And then soul style, I feel, would be amazing for brands, and I haven't actually worked with brands on that yet. It's so important for designers at the concept stage to really understand what they're designing and who they're designing for. If we look at body shapes that are out in the collective, if we look at colors and the way that we could really ask the consumers, "What do they want? What do they need now?" We're in a place where in fast fashion, we actually don't need any clothes. We don't need them. We have enough. The most sustainable piece of clothing is the one that you already own. I feel that brands could really gain a lot by thinking about who the consumer is and what their needs are, and also giving something a little bit different that's unique. Maybe more personalized for their actual soul expression to be seen, because what's in a lot of people's wardrobes is quite bland. It's almost like you said, that void buying, where you're buying for, you want to gain that state of happiness and it's really frivolous. We have this disposable culture, where we're all looking the same, we're dressed in the same clothing from the same brands and we want that connection again to clothing that holds meaning.
What that speaks to me, is that people are left in the state of wanting to fit in, and so when I work with women, this thing around the external gaze comes up all the time. "What are they going to think? What are they going to say?", rather than the question of, "Who am I? What do I want?" So this permission to actually feel into that is important. We're sort of held in a paradigm of what fashion and style looks like. When I work with women, we start with the body first and so it's like, "How do I feel today? What is the mood of me?" And within that, there's heritage, there's the somatic experience, there is this wisdom and relevance and theme. What are the colors that are resounding within you now? When it's the soul that's heard, and we really hear our body, then we can create something new. Creation over consumption. We can start to also feel into this greater self, this higher self, which I call the muse. Which is this, it might be archetypal, like I was saying about feeling a queen energy. But it might be, I don't know, it might be Madonna on their muse board. But that might give them this, "What does Madonna resemble for you? What is the power of Madonna? What is the attitude? What are the elements that she's speaking about?" Women tend to think, "Oh, she looks great in that, but I could never possibly do that. She looks great." And it's away from them. And what I find in this work is that there's a big thing around our inner child not being seen and heard, that's like a wounded inner child that feels scared to express who they really are. I also see a lot around sexuality and this disconnect and distortion with what we wear and our sexual essence, and the way the culture has defined that. So those are the two big, big things that come up when I work with women.
I'm thinking back to clients and I'm thinking back to a story of a woman, that was a young woman, 13. She remembers the time at school, and a boy commented on her hip size, because she started to blossom at that point. He mocked her bottom in a pair of leggings. This woman is now in her 40s, and hasn’t worn tight fitting clothing since then. So the way that we express ourselves, there's a direct correlation with what we wear. That sense of liberation with our self-expression is what I'm talking about here. When I work as a stylist, it's not about here's a set of rules. You need to wear this, this and this. I give a framework for color and guidance on how to bring the best assets alive in the body. But there's no, "You're an apple, you're a pear and you can only wear that. So get on with it, love." What you wear, how you feel, your body. It's all one, actually.
Where are you going to go, Kerry? What does the future look like for you?
I've got about 10 projects on the go all at once. I'm a bit of a prolific creative, and I need to anchor some pieces. Like, do not take on another project Kerry! Femininity is really running through me, so I’m wondering, where am I going to take this? I see working with brands is a big part of my work going forward. I also believe that women need a place to shop that feels the same vibration that they receive when they go through a soul style journey with me. So I think there's going to be a small project range of foundational pieces that may be personalised. I'm not sure yet. But I see a brand coming in, and I'm writing a book. The book is coming.
Kerry Wilde