Disability x Fashion: Adaptive Clothing for Every Body

CfD Conversations Fall 2025–3 | November 6, 2025

Written by Shuhan (Sisi) Wang

Design for disability is often imagined through the lens of assistive devices or medical technologies, objects which are meant to present a small portion of what accessibility requires in everyday life. Clothing, one of the most fundamental forms of design, plays a critical role in shaping how people move through the world, participate in social spaces, or express their identities. For many disabled individuals, the lack of accessible clothing turns routine activities — like getting dressed, walking in the rain, or even carrying their personal belongings — into persistent challenges. The November 2025 Conversation Series from the Center of Design about Disability x Fashion: Adaptive Clothing for Every Body, addressed this gap by reframing fashion as a key component of accessible design rather than a secondary concern.

Moderated by CAMD professor Sara Hendren, the conversation focused on the work of designer and researcher Grace Jun, whose work spans academia and nonprofit design. Drawing from her 2025 book, Fashion, Disability and Co-Design: A Human-Centered Design Approach, and her role as a founding member of Open Style Lab, Grace presented adaptive clothing as both a design methodology and a political stance. Through her work, Grace demonstrated how attending closely to disabled bodies reveals design opportunities long overlooked by mainstream fashion systems.

Disability as a Design Lens

Throughout the conversation, disability was presented not as a limitation to be solved, but as a critical lens through which design assumptions can be restructured. Grace Jun repeatedly asserted that mainstream fashion is built around an imagined “standard” body — one that stands upright, moves through the world without friction. When designers center disabled lived experience, these assumptions quickly become visible. As Grace noted, “Designing for one case really opens up to a broad range of cases,” which suggests that disability exposes design problems that affect far more people than those formally labeled as disabled.

Rather than framing adaptive clothing as a specialized category, Grace argued that disability reveals where fashion has failed to account for real bodies. She described how everyday design elements such as closures, pocket placement or material durability often become obstacles when designers don’t consider how bodies sit or move differently. When discussing her work with Open Style Lab, Grace explained that disability-centered design begins with close observation, stating that the process is “really determined on looking at someone’s self-expression and how they want to manifest that externally.” This approach reframes disability not as a problem to be fixed, but as a source of insight that challenges designers to rethink what clothing is truly meant to do and for whom it is made.

What is Adaptive Clothing — Really?

Adaptive clothing is often misunderstood as purely functional apparel — for instance, garments modified with Velcro, elastic waistband, or magnetic closures to make dressing easier. While these features are important, the conversation emphasized that adaptive clothing cannot be reduced to utility alone. Grace challenged this narrow framing by positioning adaptive fashion as clothing that responds to the full complexity of disabled life. This includes comfort, aesthetics, identity and self-expression. As she explained through her work, clothing is not simply something to just put on the body; it also can shape how individuals feel in their bodies and how they are perceived in public spaces.

Image: Adaptive Clothing — courtesy of Grace Jun

During the conversation, Grace highlighted that many adaptive garments fail because they prioritize function while neglecting desire. Clothing designed solely to solve a problem often carries a medicalized aesthetic, reinforcing the idea that disabled people should accept practicality at the expense of style. In contrast, she argued that adaptive clothing should aspire to the same standards as mainstream fashion: beauty, individuality, and cultural relevance.

The discussion reframed adaptive clothing as a design approach rather than a category. Instead of asking how to adapt an existing garment, Grace’s work begins by asking how clothing can support different ways of moving, sitting and dressing. This shift leads to designs that feel intentional rather than corrective. Examples discussed during the conversation include raincoats designed to withstand elbow abrasion for wheelchair users, backpacks that function while seated, or garments operable with one hand. These demonstrate how adaptive clothing emerges from real use rather than abstract ideals.

Some key ideas that redefine adaptive clothing may include:

• Beyond accommodation: Adaptive clothing is not about fixing bodies, but about redesigning garments to fit diverse bodily experiences.
• Function with dignity: Practical features should enhance independence without signaling difference.
• Aesthetic agency: Adaptive garments should allow users to express taste, identity and personality.
• Everyday relevance: Clothing for daily life — during work, under different temperatures, attending social events — matters as much as specialized apparel.

By expanding the definition of adaptive clothing, the conversation made clear that accessibility in fashion is not an add-on, but a fundamental design concern. Adaptive clothing, when approached thoughtfully, may become a way to question whose needs fashion has historically prioritized and to imagine garments that serve a wider range of bodies without compromise.

Designing With, Not For

A central theme of the conversation between Grace and Sara was the distinction between designing for disabled people and designing with them. She pointed out that many well-intentioned design efforts fail because they position disabled individuals as end users rather than as collaborators with expertise rooted in lived experience. Designing for often reinforces a hierarchy in which designers make assumptions about needs, while designing with requires listening and negotiation. As Grace explained through her work at Open Style Lab, meaningful adaptive fashion emerges only when disabled participants are involved throughout the entire design process, from research and prototyping to testing and refinement.

The event highlighted co-design as both a methodological and ethical commitment. Rather than just approaching disability as a problem to be solved, Grace described co-design as a practice that acknowledges disabled people as authorities on their own bodies and daily realities. This approach challenges traditional design workflows, which often prioritize efficiency or aesthetics over long-term usability. By slowing down the process and engaging in sustained collaboration, designers are able to identify needs that would otherwise remain invisible, such as how garments behave in seated positions or how closures function with limited dexterity. She noted that this work required designers to “dismantle assumptions” and to develop comfort with uncertainty, especially when working across disciplines and experiences.

Designing with disabled individuals also reshaped ideas of success and authorship in fashion. Instead of focusing solely on scalable products or market-ready outcomes, Grace stated the importance of relationships and accountability. Co-design acknowledges that accessibility cannot be standardized without losing its relevance to real bodies. Through Open Style Lab’s interdisciplinary model — bringing together designers, engineers and disabled collaborators — the conversation illustrated how designing with produces clothing that is not only functional, but also respectful, expressive and responsive to individual needs. In this framework, adaptive fashion becomes less about inclusion as a gesture and more about participation as a design principle.

Image: Open Style Lab working scene — courtesy of the Open Style Lab

Fashion Systems and Structural Barriers

While adaptive clothing addresses individual needs, the conversation also made clear that many barriers faced by disabled people are structural rather than personal. Mainstream fashion systems, which range from design education and manufacturing to retail and marketing, are largely built around able-bodied people. These systems prioritize speed, trend and visual uniformity, leaving little room for bodies that move, sit or dress differently. Grace emphasized that adaptive clothing is often treated as an exception within the industry, framed as charitable rather than a legitimate site of innovation. This marginalization limits both visibility and investment, supporting the idea that accessibility is optional rather than an essential part of life.

Image: Examples of adaptive clothing for disabilities — courtesy of Grace Jun

Grace and Sara highlighted scalability as a key challenge. Fashion industries often ask whether adaptive garments can be mass-produced or profitably marketed, yet these questions frequently ignore the structural exclusions that make such scaling difficult in the first place. Grace pointed out that designers are repeatedly asked, “What does that look like?” when imagining clothing that is both accessible and desirable, revealing a lack of imagination within existing systems rather than a lack of demand. By contrast, her work with Open Style Lab demonstrates that disability-centered design can inform products suitable for broader markets, challenging the assumption that adaptive clothing must remain bespoke or smaller scale.

The conversation also addressed how fashion’s emphasis on visual spectacle, like advertising and trend forecasting, often sidelines disabled bodies altogether. When disability is absent from representation, it becomes easier for industries to overlook access in design decisions. This absence extends into education, where adaptive fashion is frequently treated as an elective topic rather than a core design concern. Grace’s critique suggested that, without structural change, even well-designed adaptive garments risk being isolated interventions rather than catalysts for broader transformation.

By identifying these systemic barriers, the event reframed adaptive fashion as an issue of design infrastructure rather than individual accommodation. Addressing accessibility in clothing requires more than innovative garments; it demands a reevaluation of how fashion defines value and inclusion. In this sense, disability becomes a lens through which the limitations of existing fashion systems are revealed, opening space for alternative models of design and participation.

Education and the Role of Designers

The conversation with Grace highlighted that lasting change in adaptive fashion must begin in design education. Grace and Sara indicated how traditional design training often prioritizes aesthetics and marketability while overlooking accessibility and lived experience. When disability is excluded from curricula, it becomes framed as a specialization rather than a fundamental design consideration. Grace argued that disability should be understood as a central design condition because it reveals how people truly move, dress, and interact with their environments. Integrating disability into design education challenges students to question normalized assumptions about bodies and to recognize accessibility as a baseline responsibility rather than an optional feature.

The event also reframed the role of the designer as one grounded in collaboration and ethical accountability. Rather than positioning designers as sole problem-solvers, Grace underlined the importance of listening to disabled individuals as experts of their own experiences. This approach expands the designer’s role beyond creating objects to facilitating dialogue, conducting research and advocating for inclusive practices within larger systems. By embedding co-design and disability-centered thinking into the education field, designers are better prepared to challenge industry norms and contribute to fashion practices; they are not only innovative but socially — responsive and equitable.

Designing Toward Every Body

The Conversation Series topic for this month, Disability x Fashion: Adaptive Clothing for Every Body, ultimately reframed adaptive fashion as a question of design values rather than specialized solutions. Throughout the discussion, disability emerged not as an exception to be accommodated, but as a perspective that challenges fashion to reconsider whose bodies it has historically prioritized. By centering lived experience, co-design, and critical reflection, the event demonstrated how clothing can function as both access and expression. Adaptive garments, when designed thoughtfully, not only address physical needs. but also affirm dignity and identity in everyday life.

Designing for everybody requires a shift in how designers, educators and researchers define success. Rather than measuring value solely through scalability or visual impact, the conversation identified responsibility and inclusion as essential design principles. Grace Jun’s work illustrates that accessibility and aesthetics are not opposing goals, but mutually — reinforcing ones when disability is treated as a generative design lens. In this framework, adaptive fashion becomes a model for a more equitable design future — one in which clothing is no longer built for an imagined object, but for the diverse bodies that already exist.

Interested in learning more? Watch the event recording:

[embed]

CAMD Moderator:

Sara Hendren: Artist, Design Researcher, and Writer on Disability and Design; Associate Professor, Art + Design and Architecture, CAMD

Speakers:

Grace Jun: Researcher, Writer, Designer and Speaker on Accessibility in Graphic Design and Fashion; Associate Professor, University of Georgia; Founding Member, Open Style Lab

Gabby Garcia: Creative Technologies Lab Coordinator, Media Studios Organization, CAMD

Join us! #CenterForDesign

️📩 centerfordesign@northeastern.edu 🔗LinkedIn 🔗Twitter 🔗Instagram 🔗Facebook 🔗Website 🔗Newsletter