\n<\/p>\n
\u2018I<\/span>f you put your hands out and run your fingers along this skirt, you\u2019ll feel that there are soft feathers appliqu\u00e9d on to it,\u201d says the fashion designer Chet Lo. \u201cThe skirt is emerald green in colour with black panels on the side and it is designed to be very fitted on the body.\u201d Lo is speaking to a group of six guests ahead of his London fashion week show, offering them a sneak preview of his new collection that will shortly be unveiled on the catwalk.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The group stands huddled around Lo, listening intently as he talks them through each piece, pausing to pass around everything from jackets featuring spiky back panels to clingy knitted dresses. The opportunity to feel each piece is crucial for the group standing in front of Lo: each person has low vision or is blind.<\/p>\n This \u201ctouch tour\u201d has been organised by Making Fashion Accessible, an initiative from the non-profit Hair & Care founded by the celebrity hairstylist Anna Cofone in 2019, which aims to foster more inclusivity in the fashion and beauty industries.<\/p>\n After the tour, guests are invited to sit front row at Lo\u2019s show where they are presented with a pair of headphones that allow them to listen to audio descriptions of each look on the catwalk alongside a booklet featuring samples of the fabrics used in each piece.<\/p>\n \u201cI am fully blind so I got so much out of it,\u201d says Jane Manley, who works as a data analyst at the Royal National Institute of Blind People. \u201cAs someone with no usable sight, I am all about feeling the energy in the room and hearing people \u2018umming\u2019 and \u2018ahhing\u2019 as a model walks by. I can connect that energy with the swatch booklet and the audio description to create a picture of each look in my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Livi Deane, a model and beautician who lost her right eye to cancer age 12, says that without the swatches, she would \u201cstruggle to see the texture as my depth perception is quite bad. With the swatch booklet and audio descriptions, I feel I am not missing out on anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Catrin Pugh, a disability activist, describes the experience as giving her \u201cthe feeling that sight loss takes away\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pugh has vision loss due to an accident in 2013 that left her with 96% burns. \u201cI have enough vision that I can kind of see the general silhouette of a look on the catwalk and maybe the colours. So I used the fabric swatches when I could tell there was some detail I was missing. Having the capacity to feel, imagine and sense the detail opened the whole show up to me so I could feel completely part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Cofone, who has worked with clients including Dua Lipa and Lana Del Rey, credits growing up with a father who was blind as the inspiration behind the initiative. \u201cThere is this preconceived idea that a blind or low-vision person won\u2019t care about how they look and actually that couldn\u2019t be further from the truth,\u201d Cofone says. \u201cI saw first-hand as my father was losing his eyesight how dressing well really helped him to retain his identity and independence.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Cofone started by hosting hair and self-care workshops for blind and low-vision women and later expanded her efforts to try to make fashion week more accessible. \u201cIf we think about fashion as a whole, especially catwalk shows, they are so not inclusive. I was already working in the industry, so began chatting to my team about what features we could implement that would help blind and low-vision guests create their own visual of the looks.\u201d Cofone launched Making Fashion Accessible in 2024 and has since teamed up with designers including Roksanda, Erdem and SS.Daley.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lo has been involved from the beginning. The New York-born, UK-based designer is known for his tactile pieces that have been worn by Doja Cat and Kylie Jenner. \u201cLow-vision and blind people are a demographic that are really overlooked in the industry because a lot of people wrongly assume that they aren\u2019t able to enjoy fashion because they cannot see or experience clothes in the same way a sighted person can,\u201d says Lo. \u201cI wanted to prove to other designers that it is really easy to integrate this demographic into our work. It\u2019s not difficult to consider what their needs are.\u201d<\/p>\n The purple pound that represents the spending power of disabled people and their households was estimated to be worth \u00a3274bn in 2023. However, it is a cohort that is regularly overlooked, especially in fashion. Bricks and mortar shops can be difficult to navigate and websites often fail to include detailed alternative text on images that would allow shoppers to visualise the look and fit of a piece. Adaptive features such as braille clothes tags to identify colours and fabrics, and easy fastenings such as magnets rather than buttons, are also overlooked by luxury designers and the high street.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI have always adored clothes,\u201d says Lucy Edwards, a disability activist and content creator who lost her sight age 17 due to a rare genetic condition called Incontinentia Pigmenti. \u201cFashion was part of my identity and suddenly I couldn\u2019t access it. Fashion is also a massive part of our wider culture and I felt I had lost that too.\u201d<\/p>\n Edwards\u2019s guide dog Miss Molly sits next to her at Lo\u2019s show where the feathered looks are her favourite because they are \u201cmassively tactile\u201d. She compares the touch tour to how she shops for clothes: \u201cI\u2019m feeling for the cut of a neckline or if a piece is cut on the bias, the type of stitching or the length of sleeves.\u201d<\/p>\n Vix Seffens, a brand strategist who has a vision impairment due to Stargardt\u2019s disease, describes the event as \u201ca multi-layered sensory experience\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Stargardt\u2019s disease is a genetic eye condition: \u201cI had normal eyesight up until I was 11 and then it began to deteriorate,\u201d Seffens says. \u201cIt means I can\u2019t drive a car. I can\u2019t recognise someone unless they are standing right in front of me. I can\u2019t pick up a newspaper and read it. I need things on a screen to be really big and zoomed in.\u201d As a result, the touch tour and fabric swatches let Seffens form a clearer image of what appears on the catwalk.<\/p>\n \u201cI am so used to looking at things and not really being able to see them,\u201d Seffens says. \u201cAttending the show is like a puzzle you are able to put together in your mind. You have felt the fabric at the touch tour so you also know how heavy it is and how it moves. And for me, I have got to see the colours up close. Then you hear the audio so it\u2019s all those pieces coming together. Suddenly the experience of seeing the show is so much richer.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Edwards says the experience of attending fashion week and hearing from Lo first-hand makes her more daring in her own styling choices. \u201cPreviously, I would not have clashed colours and textures as I was sticking to an arbitrary fashion law I had in my head. Now, it\u2019s like we can do whatever we want and we can be whoever we want to be. That\u2019s what fashion week represents. I went blind through no fault of my own so why should I stand here and be like: \u2018Oh, I\u2019m going to just accept not feeling like myself.\u2019 I don\u2019t have to do that in 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018If you put your hands out and run your fingers along this skirt, you\u2019ll feel that there are soft feathers appliqu\u00e9d on to it,\u201d says the fashion designer Chet Lo. \u201cThe skirt is emerald green in colour with black panels on the side and it is designed to be very fitted on the body.\u201d Lo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[3349,4510,10958,23456,1661,2894,6460,2845,891,7004,23455,365],"class_list":{"0":"post-45591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-essay","9":"tag-fashion","10":"tag-guests","11":"tag-impaired","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-opening","14":"tag-photo","15":"tag-sound","16":"tag-style","17":"tag-touch","18":"tag-visually","19":"tag-week"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}