Afraid Tag

Despite representing 24 per cent of the population, models with visible disabilities feature in 0.02 per cent of fashion campaigns For all its overtures to self-expression, the style industry is probably less involved in beauty, and more involved in shielding itself from whatever it sees as ugly. Over the past couple of years, an increasingly diverse approach to casting has seen “curve”, POC, and trans models repositioned as figures of aspiration – but progress is never linear and the access afforded to some minority groups has only exacerbated the absence of others. Models with visible disabilities, for instance, rarely appear on high-end runways, seemingly destined to make tokenistic appearances in lingerie line-ups. This...