“Fashion can bring more education, representation, and the right garments to those who need them."
Bullock’s resume is uncharted: the UK's top 100 most influential disabled people, tennis Paralympian, diversity and inclusion activist, and wheelchair model. She believes “fashion can bring more education, representation, and the right garments to those who need them." Fashion is everywhere, and it’s clear to minorities when they aren’t being represented. Bullock’s own brands, SB Shop and London Represents, help with this from both sides.
SB Shop focuses on inclusive solutions to make fashion representative for everyone because, as the website states, fashion is a tool that reaches 100% of people. “SB Shop is important as we don’t have brands promoting and working in the disability field,” Bullock tells me. Her brand bridges the gap to “input the DNA of inclusion inside many brands at the same time,” she adds. Collaborating with a multitude of brands, such as Brasileña Lingerie, ‘an underwear brand focused on pieces for real women’ and Portare, leather bags with a modern design and inclusive functionality. SB Shop opens these brands to the entire market through the adaptation of design rather than the segregation of ‘fashion’ and ‘disabled fashion’. Fashion being adaptive is crucial, as there is no one size fits all in any sector of the industry. “Each person has a totally unique condition,” Bullock says, adding that’s what makes it harder “in the diversity space to scale production.”
Sinéad Burke talks about this impactfully in her TEDtalk, Why should design include everyone’. Burke, who is now becoming a household name—being the cover star and features writer within Vogue's'reframing fashion’ May issue—first caught a lot of media attention for her disability activism in the Talk from 2017. Self-described ‘little person’ Burke’s honesty about the lack of inclusivity in the design fields resonated with many people and gave a whole new perspective to an ableist mindset. She questions, when things are labelled as accessible, “what does that really mean? Who’s it accessible to? Whose needs are not accommodated for,” she says, answering the question wittingly with an anecdote about how even ‘disabled toilets’ aren’t an option for her. Wanting clothes that reflect her personality is hard, she jokes, ‘that’s difficult to find in the kids’ section’. Intertwined with her effortless humour, her talk highlights that it’s on the design world to combat the lack of accessibility because, as she says, design greatly impacts people’s lives—all lives.”
“It is important that people can see themselves represented in all aspects of life”
Bullock and Burke both represent models in the ever-expanding fashion sphere. Since 2011, Bullock’s other co-owned brand, London Represents, has been showcasing diverse models and brands at events and LFW. Only making up 0.02% of fashion representation, disabilities are a far cry from the population percentage they make up. “It is important that people can see themselves represented in all aspects of life,” Bullock says. The British Fashion Council reports that 70% of fashion companies have a diversity and inclusion strategy, which, being up 20% from last year, is a great strive for inclusion, but this is a broad statistic and seems a little wishy-washy. More specifically, they reported that 11% of fashion businesses could identify at least one disabled senior leader, but that’s only a small percentage that could be employing only a singular person. There is a long way to go to see a parity of power for disabilities in fashion, but Bullock believes that “education plays a huge role in it."
Bullock, who studied fashion merchandising at UAL back in 2017, has now returned to lecture at Central Saint Martins. As part of her work, she has been made a leader for the latest fashion project that is poised to create garments that are much bigger than the designers’ own passions. “Fashion has been able-bodied for too long,” reads the brief for the project titled Project, Planet, Purpose. The students from second year Knit, Print, FDM, and FCP are grouped and tasked with creating a range of garments that are catered towards disabilities and the planet, as the project title suggests. Bullock’s advice: “Think outside the box. Stop doing more of the same,” she says. Two students who are thinking abstractly with function and part of the group that won the overall project, are Lulu Boddey (FDM) and Arthur Berry-Smith (Print), with their nameless “transmutational” pieces made with adaptivity to aid.
Their group’s goal was “creating garments that leave it to the creativity of the wearer," as Lulu describes. Her garments, which consist of a ‘belt/bag’, ‘jacket,’ ‘skirt,’ and ‘wrap top,’ are all not what they seem. Written in quotations, these items of clothing signify ‘garments’ in their most free jacket is a contorted yet structured shape and has a large attachable ‘pocket’ that cascades down one side. The ‘skirt' triples as a ‘top’ and 'bag', and the ‘wrap top’ has four different armholes and “can be incorporated into other garments,” Lulu says. “We wouldn’t give the garments specific names... That description in itself limits the wearability." Arthur describes, detailing how the garments aren’t to be labelled as names but rather their function with description. His work consists of “ ‘trousers’, ‘shorts’ with 'skirt' attachments, which can also become tops,” he says. All garments are printed on both sides, meaning they can be worn in a multitude of different ways, aided by the channels Arthur placed with toggle fastening so they're easily “shifted around the body and accessible for disabilities,” he details. For the less adventurous in styling, the group designed labels in the clothing that have hand dawn diagrams printed on them, suggesting options to the wearer.
“We wanted to fit the basic needs of people but give it more umph,” Arthur says. Their garments, while looking stylish, were created to aid those struggling with poor mobility, for instance. The attachable and extra bags of Lulu’s work “distribute the weight around the body more evenly, helping people to get around,” she describes. While Arthur's ‘trousers’ and ‘shorts,’ which double as a top, have the added feature of poppers in the crotch area, which then becomes the neckline of the top. This design, when put in the context of someone who struggles to pull trousers down, may benefit from the access. With their own theme of heritage in their work, both students took inspiration from workwear design ideas. Lulu’s “bags” referenced “hidden pocket designs in Victorian women’s clothing where the bags were tied around the waist,” she says. While Arthur looked at his own geographical heritage, researching pit-brow women’s clothing (mining women from Wigwam), “these women wore trousers with skirts over them,” he says, adding “this idea of mixing practicality as well as decorativeness." Their research and work show there are design ideas all around us that can be reused and adapted to be more inclusive for a range of people while not sacrificing style.
Using only gifted and repurposed fabrics, such as deadstock Levi jeans and old shirting from Ralph Lauren, these students created the garments cost-free and within a deadline a lot shorter than most big brands must create a collection. This makes us question: if young talent can be inclusive, why can’t the brands that devour the fashion space? This is only a prototype for real clothes that would be created if they decided to pursue this further. But it’s a good start—planting the seed of inclusivity and adaptation in clothing while these young creatives are still coming to terms with their skills and the industry. Let’s hope that the bigger brands take notice of what their future successors are doing because, as Sinéad Burke rightfully states, “design is an enormous privilege but a bigger responsibility."