7 Elizabeth Kaino Hopper

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It’s the Attitude: Fashion Designs for Women with Disabilities

Elizabeth Kaino Hopper

Abstract

Fashion designers are famous for inventing challenges for themselves to reach new heights in creativity. The solutions are seen in haute couture runway fashions, which often create restrictions to body movement or changes to the body form that are considered to be forms of art. Fashion designers have addressed the artistic and professional dress needs of actors, rock stars, and even high powered business women, with runway aesthetics that distort the normal human silhouette and often require altered ways of movement, especially through choices in shoes, corsets, and tight-fitting clothing. These fashionable human distortions are a form of acquiring disabilities by choice. Designing around these chosen disabilities is seen as creative and artistic. Yet fashion designers have avoided the dress needs of women living with disabilities that are not acquired by choice. With advances in equal employment and equal access supported by the Disabilities Rights Movement and the Americans with Disabilities Act, more women with disabilities need fashionable clothes, especially business attire. This paper argues that the skills needed during the creative process to design fashions for women with disabilities are the same as for designing fashions that disable, for example: strong understanding of pattern shapes, graphic understanding of style lines and surface embellishments, social meanings of dress, and the properties of fibres. The paper further argues that work of historic haute couture fashion designers, from Charles Frederick Worth to the late Alexander McQueen, can inform and inspire modern designers to use all forms of disability, artificial and real, as creative challenges that can lead to exciting fashion solutions for the runway as well as for businesswomen’s dress; all it will take is an attitude change.

Key Words: Adaptive, couture, design, designers, disability, dress, fashion, inclusive, runway, women.

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1. Introduction: Fashion Design excludes disabled women

Designing for the haute couture runway is seen as the ultimate form of creativity in the world of fashion design; it sets the cycle of fashion production in motion—and it excludes millions of women with disabilities.¹

This paper explores fashion’s historic fascination with disabilities, outdated attitudes toward disabilities, existing clothing options for disabled, and the author’s creative design research into new fashions that include disabled women. The qualitative studio-work is based on results from academic research and ethnographic interviews with eight disabled women and ten able-bodied women. Data that inspired the studio-work was collected during interviews in answer to the open-ended questions: “What do you wear and why?” and “What, if anything, would you request fashion designers to change about your clothes?” Research was initiated formally in 2005-2006 as an undergraduate at University of California, Davis, (UCD) U.S.A., and resumed as a graduate student in 2009-2010 at UCD. Research is ongoing.

Definition of Disabled: The term ‘disability’ is used to include women who have reduced physical mobility that affects their activities of daily living, ADLs, including women who have not yet filed for legal status as disabled.² The phrase ‘disabled women’ is used throughout this paper instead of ‘women with disabilities’ to ease reading, and is intended to mean reduction in ADLs for a wide range of physical limitations resulting from various reasons, including but not limited to: arthritis, multiple sclerosis, injury, stroke. The term ‘disabled women’ reflects the idea that environments, including dress environments, have disabled women—better designs can enable them/us.³

Increased numbers & desire for fashion: The number of women with disabilities is growing as the baby boomer generation ages and their children enter mid-life years and experience reduce mobility due to aging. The numbers are also increasing for younger individuals through advances in medicine that increase survival rates from accidents, injuries and illnesses. There is a growing movement within disabled communities that encourages fashionable, creative dress, seen in magazines such as Logans and Chloe, and events like the Abilities Expo (Los Angeles, May 2009).⁴

Fashion Designs to Disable: The challenges designers set for themselves lead to new levels of creativity meant to shock, seduce, and stun the public. Achieving this stunning effect is most direct when the human silhouette and body form are altered, a form of disabling the able. Many designer-invented devices and garments inhibit physical movement, for example: panniers, bustles, corsets, hobble skirts, stilettos, and skinny jeans.⁵ These fashions create physical restrictions, or temporary disabilities, donned by choice in the name of fashion. Clearly, fashion designers have been fascinated with concepts of disability for hundreds of years, proving that no new skills are needed in order to design for disabled.

The artificially disabling fashions are adopted through the cycle of fashion, trickling-down from runway shows, to elite clients, to the masses of the able-bodied, especially women. For women with real physical disabilities that are not removable at the end of the day, the fashion trickle-down is more like a single droplet. The fashion world designs to disable: but it does not design for the disabled.