Meet BA (Hons) Creative Direction for Fashion Tutor Leigh Odimah

Leigh Odimah is the kind of tutor who immediately dissolves the stereotype of the intimidating fashion lecturer. As a Lecturer and Year 2 Tutor on BA (Hons) Creative Direction for Fashion (CDFF), Leigh’s relationship with students often begins before they’ve even applied. Through her work with the Insights Team, she helps young people build portfolios and see a future for themselves in fashion. She often speaks to offer holders during the application process and becomes their tutor or mentor when they join the course. “It’s a full circle moment and so valuable,” she says.

That sense of continuity shapes how Leigh talks about Creative Direction for Fashion itself. The course has a magnetism for students who are curious, visual, multidisciplinary and sometimes still figuring out what their creativity looks like.

They might arrive from styling, photography, graphics or street-casting, or with no defined label at all. What they share is an interest in how fashion communicates ideas. Leigh frames it simply: “We help students understand how to communicate fashion as a message.” It’s less about chasing aesthetics and more about understanding audiences, contexts and cultural relevance.

Her connection to the Gucci mentorship scheme brings another layer of insight to her teaching. The partnership provides selected students with a fee waiver, living allowance, mentoring and exposure to the inner workings of a global fashion house. For many students—particularly those who are carers or from low-income backgrounds—it removes barriers that often influence whether they can thrive or merely cope it removes financial pressure, giving them the freedom to focus solely on their creativity. “The scheme gives students headspace,” Leigh explains. “They’re able to focus on their learning with the support from Gucci.”

One mentorship moment has stayed with her. She supported a student who realised she was on the wrong course, despite having talent and ambition in abundance. Through conversations, Leigh helped her understand her strengths and guided her toward Creative Direction for Fashion. The switch changed everything. “I want to see all of my students win,” Leigh says. “I would mentor all day for what it brings to those students.”

Leigh’s own work outside the classroom also feeds back into the course. Awarded a Global Seed Fund, she leads Future Textures: An Afrofuture Textile Waste Story, a project connecting London and Abuja through sustainable fashion storytelling rooted in Afrofuturist and decolonial thinking. The project examines the cycle of textile waste colonialism and works with Nigerian makers—one of whom is an LCF alum—to build a digital archive and filmed documentation. It’s creative direction used not as a finishing touch, but as a mechanism for meaning and repair. Her goal is to bring the project learnings directly into teaching, particularly within the Critical Communities module.

Students on CDFF already work with communities and narratives that mainstream fashion often overlooks—from Grenfell to independent tattoo artists. Future Textures expands the lens, offering students another example of how to use creative direction to challenge systems and build new possibilities.

That commitment to showcasing the breadth of student practice is also what inspired Leigh to develop On the Grid: A Journey of Multidisciplinary Self‑Discovery, the Year 3 end‑of‑unit showcase for Creative Direction for Fashion. Designed as a student‑led platform, it brings together final‑year work across visual storytelling, brand worlds, moving image, spatial concepts, publishing and cultural research.

This year, as part of LCF Programming in the Wolfson Space from 9–11 June, the exhibition highlights how students translate their ideas into resolved, industry‑facing outcomes. Each student presents their own distinct creative direction within a shared exhibition format that encourages experimentation, personal authorship and multidisciplinary exploration. On the Grid offers visitors a clear sense of how emerging creative directors are thinking, making and communicating now—through process, voice and experimentation.