Disability fashion: Stephanie Thomas is shaking up the fashion industry
Editor’s note: This interview was originally published on 20 June 2019. It has been reviewed in September 2026 to remove obsolete formatting and promotions, repair links and clarify historical context. Corinne Gray’s interview and Stephanie Thomas’s words have been preserved.
I typically dread phone calls (hello, Social Anxiety Disorder). But in the two weeks leading up to my scheduled Skype interview with Stephanie Thomas, I was oddly excited. To me, she’s a true innovator, and being the innovation junkie that I am, I spent two weeks inside my head trying to whittle down the thousands of things I wanted to talk to her about.
Stephanie is a disability fashion styling expert, thought leader and tastemaker. She created the Disability Fashion Styling System, a method built around three ideas: clothing should be accessible, smart and fashionable. She also founded Cur8able, where her work has connected disability, clothing, styling and the fashion industry for decades.
Something not so secret about me? I tend to fan-girl over wildly accomplished women who do good in the world. So, by interview time, I had the kind of excited nervousness you feel just before you meet your favorite movie star. But from the moment her webcam came on, I felt like I was having a Skype call with a girlfriend. We talked about hair and headscarves in the first couple of minutes, like two homegirls would.
What struck me most about Stephanie was how real she was. No airs. She had spent years researching clothing and retail trends for disabled people, styling disabled actors and influencers, teaching and working with brands. Yet the conversation never felt like a polished corporate pitch.
She was also incredibly comfortable in her own skin. “We have to start defining ourselves and self-identifying in a way that empowers us,” she reminded me. “Not in a way that implicitly forces us to see ourselves through someone else’s perspective.”
Disability, identity and the problem with “overcoming”
Stephanie hates the familiar narrative of disabled people “overcoming challenges.” That framing often turns ordinary disabled life into a performance for nondisabled people: How do they do it? Isn’t it amazing? Stephanie had heard her own version of it when people noticed she did not have a thumb and immediately tried to reassure her. “Why? You don’t need to apologize for my thumb. This is the way I was born.”
We tend to design products and experiences around a narrow prototype of what a body is supposed to do. When someone’s body does not match that prototype, simply navigating the built world can be treated as an achievement.
It took Stephanie time to shed that superwoman story. As a child, dance teachers would comment on how well she danced, with an obvious unspoken qualifier attached. “Like, ballet teachers wouldn’t take me on seriously,” she remembered. “I’m unskilled in the professional’s eye, but whenever I meet a professional they are like, ‘How are you able to emulate so well?’”
Now she rejects the idea that her worth should be measured by how closely she moves through the world like a nondisabled person. “The persona of overcoming challenges actually feeds the idea that I’m different. When in reality, I’m not different, I’m Stephanie.”
Then she demonstrated what she meant. “Well, I was never created to do it like you do. I was created, and this is my normal. I have one thumb on my left hand, so I snap like this. That’s normal for this hand. I have no thumb on this hand, so I snap like this. This is my normal. It’s like being a Black woman. This is my hair. This is not ‘I’m overcoming.’”
If there’s anything Stephanie has to overcome, it’s her own fierceness. Whoo, child. snaps
Why disability fashion begins with who gets seen
Because her disability is not immediately visible, Stephanie described herself as moving through both disabled and nondisabled worlds, almost like a shape-shifting anthropologist. I wanted to know what she saw at the core of those lost-in-translation moments.
Why do nondisabled people still get it so wrong? Why do people say offensive things to and about disabled people? Stephanie pointed to her students’ response to assigned reading on disability etiquette. “My students were like, ‘Why didn’t I know this? I’ve never heard this.’ They’ve never been taught. No one knows because no one teaches it, and I am a firm believer in something that I espouse called education through interaction.”
She connected that lack of interaction to a long history of disabled people being pushed out of public life, including the so-called “ugly laws” once used in parts of the United States to police the presence of people whose bodies were considered undesirable in public.
“I think that’s why people with disabilities and people without disabilities actually don’t often know how to react because the etiquette is not taught. We’re taught, ‘Hey, don’t stare. Don’t look at them,’” she reasoned. “People with disabilities are erased.”
Erased from movies, advertisements and the collective visual vocabulary of fashion. Stephanie was more optimistic than I was about how far representation had moved. When I complained about disability stock photography, she pointed out that image libraries were at least beginning to build categories that had not existed before. “We’re on the trajectory to get there but we’re not there.”
That representation question still matters because disability fashion is not a niche curiosity. Disabled people buy clothes. They care about style. They have different bodies, tastes, budgets and access needs, and the industry has often behaved as though those customers barely exist.
Stephanie put it plainly: “You can’t market to or design for someone you don’t value, and you can’t value someone you don’t see as a fashion customer.”
In our 2019 conversation, Stephanie and I discussed disability-market spending estimates that were widely cited at the time. Those figures should be read as historical context rather than current market statistics. Her larger point has aged better than the numbers: the problem is not simply market size. It is whose bodies fashion considers worth designing for.
“You have more clothing for pets than you do for disabled people in stores,” she said. “It’s not market representation in the numbers, it’s the value. We see more value in a poodle, in a labrador, in whatever…than we do in a fashion customer with a disability.”
For Stephanie, the gap is attitudinal. “It’s not a magic pill. It’s just attitudinal.” When brands build their audience, product strategy and visual identity, disabled customers are too often missing from the picture.
That omission is also why disability can disappear from wider conversations about diversity and fashion representation. “When it comes to diversity, the D in diversity — the disability in diversity — is always left out,” Stephanie said. “When it comes to body positivity, it’s always left out.”
URevolution has also explored what happens when designers question the body they have assumed they are designing for in our interview with inclusive design expert Kat Holmes.
Seeing disability as culture
For Stephanie, better representation requires more than adding disabled people to campaigns. It requires seeing disability as culture.
“That ability to see Disability as culture would change everything,” she told me, “which is why I don’t use whack terms — and you can quote that — whack terms like ‘differently-abled’ or ‘all abilities.’”
Yes, she said “whack” and I loved her from that moment. Like, I-want-to-tattoo-her-name-on-my-arm kind of love.
Those terms, she argued, have “nothing to do with culture and how we exist in the world.” But once again, her optimism came through. “I think we’re on a trajectory and I know you hear my passion and my angst. I’m really optimistic though, because I know that this is not a race. It’s a marathon. It is not a 100-yard, it’s not a sprint. It’s going to take time.”
Her work has been part of that change: teaching, writing, styling, consulting and making disabled people visible as fashion customers rather than as an afterthought.
What does it take to be a disability fashion stylist?
I wanted to know more about Stephanie’s Disability Fashion Styling System.
“In short, it’s Accessible, Smart, Fashionable,” she explained. Those are the three principles she uses when assessing clothing for clients.
First: accessible. How easy is an item to put on and take off?
Then: smart. Stephanie uses that word for clothing that works safely for a person’s body and circumstances. In the interview, she gave examples such as garments that do not create pressure or other physical problems for a wearer.
Finally: fashionable. The clothing still has to suit the person’s lifestyle, body and aesthetic. Access does not cancel taste.
Accessible, smart and fashionable
The styling system sits inside Stephanie’s broader method, but its questions are useful beyond a professional styling appointment. They can help someone shopping for themselves, a family member or client, and they can also make designers examine assumptions built into a garment.
Stephanie gave a simple example of the questions a designer might ask: “For someone that is seated [in a wheelchair], is this accessible, smart and fashionable? For a little woman, would this be accessible, smart, fashionable?”
Working directly with clients can be more complicated. Shopping is emotional. Someone can fall in love with a garment that does not meet the accessible or smart criteria.
Stephanie starts by asking what dressing is actually like for the person. “I just ask them what it’s like dressing, or what are their challenges dressing. That’s always a loaded question because most people don’t think they have challenges,” she explained. She told me about a client who said he had no challenges dressing even though it took him three hours.
Then comes the part fashion sometimes forgets when talking about disability: preference. “The next thing we talk about is what they like. What’s your aesthetic? How do you see yourself in your mind? What’s your image of who you are and how you dress?”
When they shop together, Stephanie looks for clothing that works with the client’s body and access needs without replacing their taste with hers. Clients sometimes push back when they want something that fails one of her functional criteria.
“I get push back from my clients because they say, ‘I just like it. I just want to wear it.’ I say, ‘I get it, but I’m not going to change my policy for you. Because if I change my policy for you — if it’s not accessible, smart, fashionable — and then I, or someone else, is not there to help you dress, and you’re struggling to get in it, then we’ve just wasted our time and money. You should be able to have something that works for your body type.’”
She is firm about function, but aesthetic choices remain with the person wearing the clothes. “Styling is always co-creating,” she said. “You don’t bully people into telling them their own style aesthetic.”
That distinction matters. Adaptive or accessible clothing is useful when it solves a real dressing problem, but disabled people should not have to choose between function and clothes they actually want to wear. Our guide to adaptive clothing for disabled people explains the broader category and the kinds of design changes it can include.
Where does disability fashion go next?
When we spoke in 2019, major brands and specialist designers were already experimenting with adaptive clothing. I asked Stephanie what it would take to see more genuinely inclusive fashion.
Her advice to designers was to start with what already exists, work with disabled communities and get feedback rather than treating inclusion as an impossible design problem.
“Get over the idea it’s a design issue,” she said. “Once you discover where pockets need to be for sitting; once you discover how to make sure that someone can get in a pair of pants with braces or a leg cast, that’s it. Once you figure out magnetic closures, hook and loop, those are the design issues.”
Some garments can also become easier to use through a more universal approach: fewer complicated fasteners, easier dressing and design choices that work for more bodies from the start.
But this all comes down to choice. The fashion industry can build more options only when disabled customers are treated as people worth designing with and for.
We have to get over the idea that disability inclusion is inherently too difficult. A better question is the one designers, editors, retailers and the rest of us should keep asking whenever we make something: Who did I leave out?
For more on visibility in fashion, read our feature on models with disabilities and fashion representation.
“If you embrace diversity but ignore disability, you’re doing it wrong.”
