Sinéad Burke, chief executive officer of accessibility and inclusion consultancy Tilting the Lens, is pushing forward for adaptive design. Burke has spent the last year working on an open-source white paper on how fashion brands can better understand the disabled community.
The playbook, “Co-Designing Adaptive Fashion With the Disabled Community”, which was partly funded by Asos, touches on the power of co-design, the accessibility gap within the fashion market, how to connect with the disabled community through solutions and practices, as well as creating a sustainable landscape for disabled consumers.
“As we began to undertake the research, both quantitative and qualitative, with over 100 disabled people from a global perspective, we began to realize that the insights that we were collecting and the frameworks that we were developing couldn’t and shouldn’t just stay with us,” says Burke, when referencing her decision to make the paper open for all.
“Over 25 per cent of the sample that we engaged with said that they didn’t even know that adaptive fashion existed,” she says. “It really just created a call to action within ourselves and the need to open source the information, insight and frameworks, in the hopes that adaptive fashion and accessibility holistically becomes part of the wider agenda across curriculums, conversations and business strategies.”
Adaptive fashion has been largely embraced by the high street, with the likes of Primark and Asda’s George in the UK, but Burke’s mission is to get luxury involved.
The disabled community wants a fair shot
In the summer, Burke worked with Tommy Hilfiger on bringing adaptive fashion to this year’s CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, introducing an initiative that pairs 10 designers with muses from the disabled community in creating an adaptive-friendly look. “What we really tried to put in place was a co-design framework, ensuring that disabled people are equal stakeholders when it comes to design and that there’s learning happening across the partnership,” says Burke.
For example, Ashlynn Park of Ashlyn, who was paired with influencer and disability advocate Bri Scalesse for the challenge, thought about what a wheelchair user may need from clothes in terms of functionality and form. The designer created a bodice for Scalesse in a length that assures ease and comfort.
The co-design practice pushes forward the three pillars that Tilting the Lens has identified: function, feeling and form, which Burke says is universal to all consumers. “Most of us can really relate to the desire of having to get dressed everyday. And fundamentally, disabled people deserve that same right and experience,” she explains. “What we know from the research and the data is that disabled people have been underserved within the fashion market at every price point. There has been some really good progress in adaptive fashion at high street levels, in particular, but having one key piece is not good enough for disabled people — they need to get dressed everyday and go into the office.” Burke points out that, historically, there’s been a lack of trust between the disabled community and fashion industry because the former party has been routinely let down.
An untapped demographic
According to the thesis, the disabled community counts for $2.6 trillion in disposable income across the US, Canada, the UK and the EU, with a population of 1.3 billion that’s globally growing. Adaptive fashion accounts for $400 billion in the US alone, and there’s potential for expanding that market through design.
“What disabled people find with the adaptive options that are available is that there is a lack of consideration around the aesthetic. There is a lack of variety in terms of pattern, style, color palette and fabrications,” says Burke. “Disabled people want a choice in what they want to wear. What we are hearing from disabled consumers is that the current baseline is not up to satisfactory levels.”
There’s also a demand for a 360 wardrobe that includes casual daywear and cocktail attire, as well as stylish footwear and accessory options. Burke hopes that the Tilting the Lens’s report will help broaden the perception and imaging of the disabled community.
Educating the future
Tilting the Lens wants to cement the conversations it had with past collaborators such as Farfetch, Ralph Lauren, Netflix, Pinterest and Unilever in order to give brands a springboard for continuing to cater to the disabled community. “We have been really clear that education is part of our mission, but also part of our practice,” says Burke.
Before venturing into the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund’s challenge earlier this year, Tilting the Lens hosted several workshops on co-design for the contributing designers to ensure there was a baseline knowledge and understanding of the processes and frameworks of adaptive fashion.
Burke’s consultancy has been partnering with New York’s Parsons School of Design for the last three years working with its fashion students. “We hope that that creates a pipeline of talent in the fashion industry, both in the US and further afield, but this cannot become an exception. We need to create pipelines of talent in fashion education,” says Burke.
