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Zooey Gleaves left Dulwich in 2013 after 11 years. He came out as gay in Year 8. ‘I was the only kid who was out for some time before other people came out around me. I didn't realise until later that I was representing a community. I would have ten straight boys asking me a whole myriad of questions about my identity every day’. Zooey says that his experience of the school was ‘in a lot of ways, incredibly positive and my time there has informed many of the things that I have gone onto do’. However, there were also experiences which he found very difficult to deal with, eventually leading to a period when he contemplated leaving the College ‘A lot of the things that were said to me, and a lot of the questions that I had to answer, were incredibly challenging. At the same time, the teachers who I really liked were the ones who didn’t judge me’. He also found that having a robust sense of humour was incredibly valuable. ‘If you can laugh at the thing that would otherwise make you feel small, it becomes that much easier to deal with. I also learned to fight for my corner. I’ve had to have a certain level of sass, for want of a better word, to push back’. As Zooey entered the Upper School, it was obvious that the College was prepared to tackle head on many of the issues that he had faced. ‘From the top down it was made clear that racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination would not be tolerated’. Zooey studied History of Art at Bristol University and despite being out for a long time by then there was a definite sense of ‘starting school all over again. I was never going to be seen as anything other than the gay kid in the class, at least at first. I’d say that the University of Bristol is fairly conservative and I didn't particularly enjoy it there and found that aspect in particular quite tricky. I left university not feeling as good as when I started, but that was for a whole myriad of reasons. It wasn't just the university itself’. ZOOEY GLEAVES
What next? You seem incredibly in an incredibly good place at the moment and very much doing the things that you love. I have just played a Boiler Room on my own and I am the first drag queen to curate and DJ one solo which is quite a big deal - it's not just about playing music, it's about creating a fantasy world in real time. I'm hoping to kind of put a lot more attention into that because it's enormously fulfilling and really fun. I'm also going to be going solo and freelance in the new year as a creative director working again on whether it be artists campaigns working with you know, brands and fashion labels. In terms of broadcasting keeping up my show on Foundation FM and then I have a podcast series that I've written I'd really like to be made which is all about the intersection between nightlife and fashion and how nightlife has been a breeding ground for boundary breaking fashion. What advice would you give to anyone looking to move into the creative industries? I was asked to do a talk at this festival called Upgrade Yourself Festival, which is for young creators for 18 to 24 and at Somerset House, and they asked me to put together some tips for young creatives and how to get into the creative industry. What I kind of came up with was be open to collaboration with people of your own age, and be open to kind of trying a whole variety of different things. Not everything has to be a success. Not everything has to work, regardless of how much you try, and that's fine. The thing is, is that if you know that you're a creative person, but don't necessarily kind of slot into one specific thing, then try everything. Failure is not the end, it is a learning experience.
through the bins but I couldn't find them, so I got fired and had to pay her back the money. They cost £750, which annoyingly was all the money that I'd saved up over the summer. And then I got to the beginning of January 2019, and was working in a job I hated, I was at Tate Britain in the members room, I had no money and really strung out. It was at that point that decided not to drink for a year, and then see where my life is. And I also started DJing, at the beginning of 2019. And all of the benefits that came with not drinking kind of happened. It is still the best thing I've ever done in my life. It focused me, gave me more confidence, more drive.
It meant that if I failed at something, or wasn't happy with something, I had nothing else to blame but myself.
What were the consequences of that decision? Well, it gave me enormous confidence. And it gave me enormous clarity. I had also started being invited to fashion parties and events; I had nobody to go with and was going in drag. And so I basically had to kind of go to these parties by myself and network and kind of not rely on alcohol or anything to soften the edges. Fortunately for the most part it was a mixed cultural Show Store crowd but I was still trying to launch and self promote myself. It proved to be a great way for me to workshop my look and my character. At the same time I knew it was time to leave the Tate and made me a lot more proactive to find a new job. And then that's how I was very lucky to meet a woman called Imogen Snell who I still work with today. She founded is Studio IS Studio back in 2017 and needed someone to come and help her. Studio IS a super small company. I started off as Imogen’s assistant and worked my way up to being one of three people in the company who basically works across all the campaigns as a creative director. I have been there for three and a half years now. Studio IS is basically a creative direction studio, mainly working with music, and musicians and labels. Essentially labels come to us with artists who need creative direction. We help to flesh out the world or the universe of the artists on that album; and that filters into everything from press photos, album photos and artworks, music videos, to their styling, makeup, hair costume. We also help with their live shows. It is a 360 degree, perspective look and feel, which helps kind of elevate a campaign and give it an identity. I look back to that time when I was looking at the work of Grace Coddington and realise how close I have come to achieving the goals I set myself soon after leaving university. I am very lucky to be collaborating with wonderful people who spend their working lives bringing together so many creative ideas to achieve a collective vison. I have met so many incredible people from trying so many different things and I am always looking to find a way to work with them in the future. Its been enormously helpful because then your kind of creative community just ever expands, which if you are a creative person is the most helpful thing.
as doing the styling assisting and working at Show Studio, and also doing this Club Collective and starting to do radio, which I also started doing the end of 2017 beginning of 2018. I was also doing drag and trying to figure out how that worked for me and trying to do drag in creative ways, not just in clubs, but also thinking about ways that it could translate into photography and making images. At any point, were you still confused about your sexuality, or the direction in which wish you wanted to take it? There was a point maybe the summer of 2018, where I thought that I might identify as non binary only because I was doing more drag. A lot of that is a kind of an investigation into one's own gender identity and kind of the multiple ways that that can look and can be. I think anybody who does drag or kind of performs in gender, will at some point, have a conversation with themselves and ask if this something that I want to do in my everyday life as well as just in my creative practice? For me, I kind of came to the conclusion that those two things were separate, and that I did identify as a man and that my interest in gender was purely creative. It wasn't necessarily something that I felt I identified with or needed to express further. You have stated previously that you have not always had a good relationship with alcohol. I didn't really get anywhere or start doing things in a kind of serious, concentrated and elevated way until I stopped drinking which I did on the first of January 2019. I haven't had a drink since. Until then I was struggling with alcohol and it was definitely something which was impacting me and my mental health, the way I looked, the way I felt and the fact that I was becoming a more and more of a horrible drinker. I'd be like, blacking out. It was one thing having alcohol affect my private life but I really began to question what I was doing when after a night when I had too much to drink and I left two Lanvin corsages, which had been bought specifically for a photo shoot, on Hackney marshes. I returned to Hackney marshes at 6am the next morning and went
Post University I spent some time looking at image and experience creation. I remember looking at an issue of American Vogue and the work of Grace Coddington, who was the Creative Director for American Vogue for a very long time. She looks at so much more than just styling, it's about coming up with concepts, finding the right photographer, the right makeup artist so she can create these amazing ‘worlds’. That was something that I felt I could probably do very, very well. But those jobs are the probably the rarest jobs in fashion. Fortunately, the thing about working in fashion is that it's not very challenging to get a job as a gay man. Show Studio and Nick Knight My first big internship in the Spring of 2018 was working at Show Studio, which was run by the photographer, Nick Knight. It which was amazing. I couldn’t wait to get there every day to chat to everybody, to catch up and do the work. It was there that I met a stylist there called Charlotte Roberts on a shoot that we did with Nick and she was looking for an assistant. So that's how I finally found my stylist assistant job. I knew that I wanted to do more work in fashion and although at that stage it was not my ultimate goal it was paid work and definitely the first step on the ladder. Personal and Professional Development During my time at Show Studio and then while I was working with Charlotte, I was also getting more involved with a DJ Club Collective that I founded with three friends called ‘Prestige Pack’, and they had been kind of doing gigs at their universities in Manchester, and Leeds. And then we all decided when we came back that we do something together. We've just done our first Boiler Room which is the biggest platform for DJs, it has a subscriber base on YouTube of three million and growing. It is a great place to promote yourself as a DJ. When did you get into drag? The drag started at uni. It was something that I tried to foster more and more when I came back to London. At the same time
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