2. A New Attitude

If designers have the skills to design for the disabled, and there is a growing market, why have fashion designers not embraced the challenge? Academic research indicates the reluctance is more about attitudes toward disabled bodies and roles in society than about profit or creativity. One new attitude can be adopted to broaden the availability of fashions for women with real disabilities—inclusiveness. A contextual look at history and changing societal trends reveals why exclusion-attitudes toward bodies, stigma, and marketing are outdated and why inclusion-attitudes are needed for the new millennium.

Ideal Bodies: The ideal body has roots in ancient societies’ admiration of unattainable beauty.⁶ In the twenty-first century, the prevailing belief is that the ideal body is attainable through diet, exercise, corrective undergarments, and plastic surgery.⁷ The onus of owning the perfect body, and maintaining it, is put squarely on the individual. The myth that every woman is capable of shaping her body to mimic the ideal body empowers fashion designers to decide which bodies are ideal, demonstrated in their runway models. The danger is that the fashion designers (and their companies) create stigma and segregation by rejecting all other bodies, especially bodies with disabilities.⁸ Some justify this eugenic behaviour with marketing statistics, yet potential markets for clothing that works for non-ideal bodies and includes differently able bodies cannot be realized until fashion designers include, rather than exclude, the disabled in their processes.

Stigma v. visibility: A look at the history of disabilities reveals that exclusion thinking is not new, and has repeatedly resulted in removal of disabled people from societies through institutionalization and even extermination.⁹ In institutions (including care facilities, nursing homes, hospitals, rehabilitation and mental health centres), the garments for disabled and handicapped (when provided) were designed for efficiency of dressing, toileting, and laundering—not fashion—which created the stigmatized target market of adaptive wear.¹⁰ This efficient attitude persists today and is the major determinant of fashion for the disabled.

Visibility of disabled women has increased over the past twenty years with the help of well-established disability rights and independent living movements in the U.S.A. and Europe. Legislation, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act that ensures access to buildings and equal employment opportunities, increases public-interface and earned income. As disabled women’s public access possibilities increase, so does the need to dress fashionably.¹¹ The desire to manage one’s identity through dress choices, and thus manage stigma, is equally important to disabled as well as able-bodied women, and their opinions about fashion styles are independent of their ability levels.¹² For fashion designers, this opens a new area of design that requires expanding functional features to ease the dressing process (not as extreme as adaptive wear) while maintaining current trends in fashionable details of colour, style, texture, and surface design.

Marketing: The mass market for garments for disabled has historically been considered a specialty target market with a strong medical bias. However, studies show that disabled women want to shop where everyone else does which is only possible when mainstream fashion brands with easy-dressing features are offered in mainstream retail outlets.¹³ Branding and prêt-à-porter sales are important financial cogs in the fashion marketing cycle, and changing the attitude to include customers with physical disabilities has potential to expand existing markets.