IMAGES Courtesy of Homotopia & Converse
Collaboration is at the heart of great creativity, whether it’s on runways or running around football fields. In the worlds of fashion and of sport, trust, shared passion and community spirit are necessary for inspiring and fulfilling teamwork. United by their shared ethos to build a more inclusive, more creative, and more diverse football community, Converse has teamed up with Liverpool FC throughout 2023 to release a series of campaigns that celebrate both fandom and queer identities.
Football has stereotypically long been perceived as a heteronormative boys club, with previous findings from Stonewall found that 43% of LGBTQ+ young people think sporting events are not a welcoming space for them. However, unlikely pairings often make for the best outcomes – Liverpool FC fans perhaps know this best, choosing the unexpected hit, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, as their chosen rallying cry at matches. With the rise of LGBTQIA+ football supporter groups and the growing popularity of women’s football, you’re now more likely to see an inclusive crowd enjoying the game. Football is now for everyone.
For the AW23 campaign, Converse and LFC enlisted the help of Homotopia, a Liverpool-based organisation using art and activism to promote social justice, for its design. The campaign, entitled ‘Creating From The Ground Up’, spotlights a new generation of passionate young Liverpool fans while putting queer creativity to the forefront. Combining their passions for the Reds, the collective’s goal was to honour the community surrounding the club and recreate the excitement of a match day experience.
The resulting campaign sees a host of LFC fans – including multi-discipline creative Dredz, singer-songwriter Pixey and artist Sterling Rose Kelly alongside members of the senior LFC squads Darwin Nunez, Missy Bo Kearns and Taylor Hinds – smiling and laughing while wearing the Converse x LFC collection, standing on a collage that features Converse’s signature stars patchworked with shades of crimson and ruby. Elsewhere in the campaign, football-related slogans and catchphrases are scribbled throughout along with ‘Y.N.W.A’ to represent the fans’ song of choice.
Founded in 2003, Homotopia aims to support and platform local, national, and international LGBTQIA+ socially engaged artists and creatives through hosting the UK’s longest-running LGBTQIA+ arts and cultural festival, as well as its artist development programmes and Young Homotopia workshops.
For this latest instalment of the ‘Creating From The Ground Up’ campaign, Converse has provided a platform for Liverpool FC fans to get creative. Utilising the brand’s creative toolkit, Homotopia pushes their shared intentions into action, ardently uniting the fans and footballers with the artistry, innovation and open expression exploding from Liverpool’s creative scene.
Below, BRICKS Editor – and fellow Liverpool supporter – Tori West meets the creative minds behind the campaign, Homotopia’s Olivia Graham, Jess Scott, Margie Houlston, Sian Bennett, Kolade and DJ Lauren Lo Sung, and discovers the inspirations behind their collaged campaign designs, their uniting love for the Reds and what makes them kick.
Tori: Firstly, I’d love to hear from each of you about how you got involved with Homotopia?
Sian: The first time I started working on Homotopia, they invited me on a project with Liverpool [FC] centred around the Red Rainbow Laces campaign. There was artwork that went up as billboards all around the club during the Rainbow Laces Week in the Premier League. It was a chance to spotlight LGBTQIA+ fans. That was the first time I’d ever really thought about being gay and being a Liverpool fan and those two things coexisting. To go to the game and then see myself on a billboard outside the ground was mind-blowing. That was something I was really, really proud of. I’d never really spoken about those two things together or out loud before. It was just brilliant to have Homotopia as a platform to do that.
Jess: I’ve never worked with Homotopia before this project with Converse, but I had seen the work that they had done around the city. I got involved through meeting Olivia, Margie and Sian via the grassroots football community. Two years ago, I never could have even seen myself playing football again, let alone would have known the opportunities that it could have brought to my life. It’s amazing seeing the football community and the creative community come together. But yeah, that’s, that’s how I got involved. And I’m really, really thankful for that.
Two years ago, I never could have even seen myself playing football again, let alone would have known the opportunities that it could have brought to my life. It’s amazing seeing the football community and the creative community come together.
Jess
It seems like the community is truly at the heart of Homotopia. How did you first feel when you were approached by Converse and Liverpool Football Club, and what were your expectations of the project?
Olivia: We did that through Homotopia and then got the creative centres that would make sense. I think that I’ve done work for a few years with different brands and with LFC from an individual perspective on inclusion in football, and then I was approached because we’ve worked with Converse.
My first thought was thinking of ways that we could make sure that the latest campaign was really inclusive of the LFC community. I wanted to be sure that we could open it up to as many people as possible so that it wasn’t just me again, or just one or two individuals having an input. Converse was really receptive to that. And then, lo and behold!
Margie: Yes, when the project was first brought forward, [my reaction] was something along the lines of ‘Oh my gosh, that’s exciting!’ But there was a whole lot of impostor syndrome there as well. My expectations of the project made me reflect a little bit more on myself as a creative and a sports person who’s interested in fashion. It was interesting to think about how those things could come together.
It’s interesting what you said about imposter syndrome, I feel like that never goes away. I guess when things that were originally passion projects, hobbies or when your identity is so attached to your work, you can so easily forget it’s your job. I think a lot of people will relate to that level of imposter syndrome when they work with brands they have such a personal relationship with like Liverpool FC and Converse. So what was the initial inspiration behind the campaign? I assume you had a brainstorming meeting before you started? What were your initial ideas and how did they come to be?
Sian: One thing I thought was really nice as part of the briefing process was that we all had to bring an item that meant something to us about supporting Liverpool Football Club. I think it was just really fun to be in a room with loads of real fans and people who are so passionate about it.
[The items] I brought were flags, because whenever Liverpool gets to a final – and I think this is a little bit of a Scouse thing as well – people just love dressing their houses with flags and scarves. I love that, so I brought all of the flags that we drape around the house whenever we get to a final.
My mom’s been going to the game since she was six in the 60s, and her mom got me there. She used to make these rosettes and when they did the game years ago, they’d all be dressed up and they’d put these big pin rosettes. For me, it’s actually the women in the family where the strongest force of LFC fandom has come from – it’s been passed on throughout the generations, which I think is amazing and what I wanted to focus on.
For me, it’s actually the women in the family where the strongest force of LFC fandom has come from – it’s been passed on throughout the generations, which I think is amazing and what I wanted to focus on.
Sian
Jess: It was really amazing to be in a room with such passionate Reds from all different walks of life. That was just amazing. Converse gave us a lot of freedom and let us lead the narrative which helped me to get over the imposter syndrome that you might feel when working with iconic brands like Converse and LFC. I used to work in hospitality at Anfield, so to get to, five or six years on, bring my professional practice into a job that I used to do every week working behind the club’s bar was such an amazing, full circle moment for me.
Margie: What I thought was quite interesting was that, obviously, we were all different individuals and different creatives and we all create in different mediums, but they really meshed well together. It felt like everything started working quite organically. I think having that freedom that Jess was [talking about], having the freedom and space to explore being creative with no parameters is perfect. It created a space to think ‘Oh, let’s just see how this creative process will go’.
How did your ideas develop through the process?
Olivia: One thing that I loved during the process was how flexible both LFC and Converse were about our chosen creative mediums. For me, I tried to think about all of the elements of being a fan attending the matches, and throughout the project it was great because it developed to go beyond just visuals. Lauren and Sian, in particular, are always thinking about music and atmosphere and creating playlists thinking of the sounds of the big matches. Kolade, being a movement expert… I suppose a lot of people wouldn’t really consider movement important, but football is basically dance, drama and loads of acting, so our design elements were trying to include those things.
Margie: I think for me, it was a great project… I can be a perfectionist with my creative practice. This can stop me from being creative in a lot of ways because I’m constantly thinking it’s not good enough. I have to make sure that everything is absolutely perfect.
I feel like it has opened me up a little bit more to be free to be a work in progress, to just go and sketch and not have to worry about the final product initially, it made me realise it’s okay to make a mistake and develop. I think that was a challenge, but also something that I felt was a platform to really overcome it all. I’m not going to say it has completely stopped me from being a perfectionist going forward, but it’s something that has really made me realise that to be able to deliver my creative processes means letting go of that.
Converse gave us a lot of freedom and let us lead the narrative which helped me to get over the imposter syndrome that you might feel when working with iconic brands like Converse and LFC.
Jess
Image courtesy of Margie Houlston
How did you utilise Convere’s tool kit to do this project for Liverpool FC?
Jess: For me, it definitely helped give me a bit of a guideline for what they were looking for. I think it included tasks and activities to get us started. It was a quick turnaround – for the illustrations, we had around 3-4 days to complete them. The creative toolkit was helpful in that sense, it gave us some creative tasks to do to get the ball rolling, like deconstructing the Converse logo and turning it into the LFC logo, that was a really helpful starting point.
As this was the first time for many of you that you worked on a brand’s campaign of this size, can you tell me about what you learned during the production process? Any challenges you perhaps had to overcome and how you did this, or anything you’ve learned personally about your professional practice that you will take forward with you?
Olivia: I’ve had opportunities to work with big bands before and I’ve found it enjoyable, but I’ve also been approached about the experience of being a football fan. I think what I love so much about this is that the campaign still felt like a match-day experience. We were able to bring more people in so it meant that [the campaign] stayed authentic to who we are together as a football community. The stuff that we did in the workshops at the match, we still maintained our relationships and our personalities as football fans. We didn’t have to condition ourselves to be more appropriate for corporate spaces or working with companies.
Being gay, there will be certain scenarios where I’ll naturally dial [myself] down a bit or won’t really bring it up. Definitely, football was a space like that for me, I felt like it just didn’t need to be a big part of my identity in that space. It’s wild to think that this part of me is the reason that I’ve worked with the football club that I’ve supported since I was a little girl.
Sian
Finally, why has this partnership been so special and what do you hope new Liverpool FC fans and Converse customers alike will take away from the campaign?
Sian: On a personal note for me – being gay, there will be certain scenarios where I’ll naturally dial [myself] down a bit or won’t really bring it up. Definitely, football was a space like that for me, I felt like it just didn’t need to be a big part of my identity in that space. It’s wild to think that this part of me is the reason that I’ve worked with the football club that I’ve supported since I was a little girl. I know that’s dead cheesy, but that was the first time I’d ever thought of it, when I started working with Homotopia and this campaign, and I hope others can feel the same.
Margie: Yeah, I think that’s really beautiful because sometimes it is scary making your sexuality that visible. But I also think it’s so empowering, and I really hope that what people can get out of these projects is that the younger [generations] can look up and see people whose identities they can relate to and know this is a safe space for those non-binary, queer and female supporters.
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