What’s Next in the World of Adaptive Fashion?


The concept of making fashion inclusive to people with disabilities isn’t new, but it is complicated. For over 20 years between 1955 and the mid-1970s, American fashion designer Helen Cookman and New York Times style editor Virginia Pope fought to make adaptive fashion accessible. Together, the two founded the Clothing Research and Development Foundation, overseeing the largest collaborative effort to create adaptive fashion in the U.S., as well as Functional Fashions, an adaptive clothing line designed by Cookman and nearly 30 other participating designers. Before she died in 1973, Cookman teamed up with American denim giant Levi’s to create a truly functional pair of pants, later named the 1975 jeans. They featured full-length zips and stretch denim fabric as well as easy-to-reach pockets for added utility. As a deaf woman, Cookman recognized early on how important—both socially and financially—it is for the fashion industry to cater to people with disabilities by designing not only functional clothing but functional stylish clothing.

In the close to 50 years since Levi’s 1975 jeans were released, the industry’s dedication to adaptive fashion has fluctuated at best. But the last decade has seen a resurgence on the part of both independent and global brands—brands that have come to understand the same concept that Cookman did: The roughly 13% of the American population that currently lives with a disability is worth catering to, and not just because doing so makes the companies look good. According to the American Institutes for Research, 22 million of those people are of prime working age and have a disposable income (after-tax income to cover necessities, including clothing) of around $490 billion and a discretionary income (leftover income for non-necessities) of about $21 billion. That’s a market of over half a trillion dollars. And now that the World Health Organization is reporting that the population of people with disabilities is expected to rise with age and the increasing prevalence of noncommunicable diseases, those numbers are only going to go up.

There is still much work to be done, but we’re seeing promising progress year over year.

Tommy Hilfiger, Founder and Principal Designer of Tommy Hilfiger and Tommy Adaptive