Women Designers Transforming Fashion for People With Disabilities

If you searched the internet for “adaptive clothing” even as recently as a decade ago, not many results would pop up.

Adaptive clothing is designed specifically with people with disabilities in mind. Adaptive clothes are intended to give freedom and comfort to the people who wear them, but many of the clothes that were offered were not stylish, and they prioritized function over fashion.

But why not both function and fashion? In recent years, along with greater visibility and advocacy by people with disabilities has come a growing awareness in the fashion world. A small number of designers have started to come onto the scene to fill this gap in the market, and women are among those leading the way.

Canadian fashion designer Izzy Camilleri was a fashion lover from a young age, and initially entered the industry and started her own business in 1984. It wasn’t until 20 years later that she had her first foray into adaptive fashion, when she was introduced to a Toronto-based wheelchair user who was looking for a designer to make a custom cape.

Not having previous experience in this area, Camilleri began to research, and discovered that there were next to no brands designing fashionable clothes for people who use wheelchairs.

From this point, Camilleri spent years designing custom adaptive clothing for other wheelchair users and listening carefully to the needs and desires of her consumers. Camilleri quickly recognized the importance of adaptive clothing: “I really realized the emotional impact that the work I started to do was having on the people I was working for.”

Camilleri went on to launch IZ Adaptive, an adaptive clothing brand, in 2009. Initially, Camilleri’s brand focused on providing wheelchair users with stylish, comfortable clothing, but IZ Adaptive has since expanded to cater to people with all types of physical disabilities.

This is not an area that should be entered into lightly, without research, says Camilleri, explaining how ill-fitting or badly designed clothing can be detrimental to the comfort of people with disabilities. For example, a pair of pants with inappropriately placed seams or pockets could cause pressure sores for wheelchair users.

Camilleri spent years thinking about how to design stylish and comfortable pants for people who use wheelchairs. She thought this was impossible until she had a breakthrough with her design that led to the 2021 launch of the Game Changer Pant. Unlike the majority of standard trousers and pants, the back of the Game Changer Pant is designed to be pocketless and seamless, features that work to prevent harmful pressure sores from forming.

Although some adaptive clothing existed back when Camilleri’s career launched, she has changed the landscape of the industry by proving that adaptive clothing can be stylish. In 2022, Camilleri was awarded the Canadian Arts and Fashion Awards (CAFA) Fashion Impact Award and the Women Empowerment Awards Innovation Award for her role as a key player in changing the industry. “Knowing how important these clothes are to people gives me all the fuel I need to want to continue to grow,” says Camilleri.

Victoria Jenkins, founder and CEO of adaptive clothing brand Unhidden, identifies as a disabled woman herself, having experienced life-changing health issues in her early 20s. Using her knowledge as a garment technologist and personal experiences as a patient in hospitals, Jenkins was inspired to create an adaptive fashion range that combines both function and fashion.

Since it was launched in 2017, Unhidden became the first adaptive brand to become a member of the British Fashion Council, has been featured in London Fashion Week, and, after partnering with co-retail start-up Sook, became the first adaptive brand to have retail space in multiple locations.

The fashion industry is slowly but surely embracing adaptive clothing, but it seems most retailers are not following suit. Owners and executives of many larger brands lack the personal experience of living with a disability, and they are hesitant to even hire people with disabilities, explains Jenkins. “They don’t hire people with disabilities, so they don't see the scale of the issue, nor do they know how to engage with us,” says Jenkins, going on to explain that she thinks this is due, in part, to the assumption that it would cost too much to make adaptive clothing and there would be no net return.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Statista, an online platform that specializes in market and consumer data, the global adaptive clothing market was at $271.88 billion in 2019, and growth is projected to $348.81 billion by 2024. There is evidently money in this business, so why do many mainstream brands neglect to consider customers with disabilities?

Smea Gedik, CEO of AUF AUGENHOEHE, an inclusive fashion brand based in Germany, learned that our world is not designed for people with disabilities from her cousin, who is a little person. With a background in fashion design and clothing technology, Gedik set out to construct an inclusive fashion brand after she researched adaptive fashion and found few brands that catered to a disabled customer base.

Having started this research for her master’s thesis, Gedik committed herself to the cause of diversifying the fashion industry, and launched her brand in 2018. Gedik’s is one of a few brands that work with a focus on little people. “I knew this was a lifelong project for me,” says Gedik, explaining that inclusivity can’t be just a seasonal trend.

Like Camilleri, Gedik highlights the importance of doing in-depth research. Gedik and her team spent years constructing an inclusive size chart to properly cater to their customers and help to communicate their needs.

Gedik explains that it was important for her to include people with disabilities in every step of the process. By including people with disabilities in the research, design, and even the modeling of her clothing, Gedik ensures that she accurately creates what the consumers want. This ingenuity and willingness to learn are traits shared by Camilleri and Jenkins.

Nowadays, if you search the internet for “adaptive clothing,” the results page will instantly be flooded with results. IZ Adaptive, Unhidden, and AUF AUGENHOEHE are just three of a number of brands coming onto the market and making a change.

Larger brands are lagging behind. It’s not possible yet to walk into a shop in a standard shopping mall and find a pair of adaptive trousers for wheelchair users.

Jenkins’ hope for the future is that every brand can start to include adaptive design in their offering — the same as having tall, petite, curve, and maternity wear lines; she says, “From a sustainable angle too, it makes sense to be smarter in how we design to not exclude anyone.”