Wayne Hemingway has made an outstanding contribution to the field of social design in which he occupies an iconoclastic, outspoken and enormously respected position.
Founder of the hugely influential Red or Dead fashion label, he has gone on to make his mark across a broad field of design, most recently embarking on the design of affordable housing.
His book, Mass Market Classics: A Celebration of Everyday Design, is already established as one of the most important design books to have emerged this century.
His background is firmly rooted in the north, in working class culture and in the belief that good design should be available to everybody.
With Gerardine, Wayne created the label Red or Dead, which won global acclaim, winning the prestigious British Council’s Streetsyle Designer of the Year Award for an unprecedented 3 consecutive years in 1996, 1997 and 1998. After 21 seasons on the catwalk at London Fashion Week, they sold Red or Dead.
He went on to set up “hemingwaydesign” which specialises in affordable, social housing. The largest project is the highly acclaimed, award winning Staiths South Bank, a mass market housing project on Tyneside. Other housing projects include the regeneration of a large social housing scheme in North London and The Birchin affordable apartment development in Manchester.
Recent projects include creating a new vision and then a masterplan for 60’s new town, Skelmersdale; creating a vision for Whitehaven, a town in Cumbria suffering from large scale job losses following the decommissioning of Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant; and the highly acclaimed design for the new Institute of Directors club in London.
He is Professor in the Development and Planning Department of Northumbria University.
He is involved in a number of major charity initiatives including the Prince’s Trust where he was the inaugural chairman of an initiative giving opportunities for disadvantaged youth to enter the fashion industry.
