A new scholarship and mentoring program is enabling more students with disabilities to pursue college degrees in fashion and careers in the fashion industry.
The Parsons Disabled Fashion Student Program, a collaboration between New York City’s Parsons School of Design and Tilting the Lens—a consultancy that helps clients create accessible solutions—a provides students with tuition, living expenses, mentoring from fashion industry insiders, and other types of assistance. The program’s aim is to make the prestigious design school and the fashion industry itself, more inclusive and equitable.
Until recently, the fashion industry was notorious for excluding or ignoring the disabled community. And while inclusive and adaptive clothing has become increasingly available, the industry was still mostly closed to disabled fashion creatives. According to its website, Parsons, which is affiliated with Greenwich Village’s The New School, is “committed to breaking down these barriers to provide access to fashion education and careers and, by doing so, helping the industry reach its full creative potential.”
Ben Barry, Dean of Parsons School of Design, spent three years working to get the program off the ground. Since being appointed dean in 2020, Barry, who identifies as disabled, has made a commitment to social justice in fashion.
Parsons’ program of study reflects that commitment. For example, the school offers courses such as “Indigenous Fashion; Fat Fashion: Design for Large Bodies; Blackness and Fashion; Fashion and Disability Justice; Latin American Fashion; Sensory Design; and Fashion and the Land.”
Students in the program can expect to be mentored by disabled fashion designers such as Sky Cubacub, who has an invisible disability, and Sugandha Gupta, who has Albinism. High fashion model Aaron Rose Philip who has cerebral palsy and has worked with designers such as Versace and Moschino, also serves as a mentor.
Scholarship money for the new program will be provided by retail giant H&M, and the Ford Foundation, a leading voice in disability philanthropy, will conduct research on disabled students’ fashion school experiences. Parsons says that the program is open to any disabled student “with a passion to design fashion to bring their fresh and diverse perspective.”
The Parsons Disabled Students Program isn’t the college’s first foray into disability justice. Several years ago, Parsons partnered with Open Style Lab, a nonprofit “dedicated to creating functional, wearable solutions for people of all abilities without compromising style.”
As this blog reported in 2021, “among OSL’s most important offerings is the accessible design course it provides through its collaboration with Parsons School of Design. OSL Academy provides classes and experiential learning opportunities that teach students about disability, accessibility, adaptive fashion and universal design.”
Parsons has also partnered with the Special Olympics to create inclusive apparel for athletes. Regarding the partnership, Brendan McCarthy, Systems and Materiality BFA Program Director at Parsons, told Mission magazine, “it can be used as a model for fashion and athletic/performance design houses, businesses more broadly and educational institutions to re-think how they approach critical issues around equity, inclusion [and]social justice…”
