Touch, sound and style: how London fashion week is opening up to visually impaired guests – photo essay | London fashion week
‘IIf you hold out your hands and run your fingers along this skirt, you will feel soft feathers applied to it,” says fashion designer Chet Lo. “The skirt is emerald green in color with black panels on the side and it is designed to be very fitted on the body.” Lo speaks to a group of six guests before her show at London Fashion Week, offering them a sneak peek of her new collection which will soon be unveiled on the catwalk.
The group stands huddled around Lo, listening attentively as he tells them about each piece, stopping to pass around everything from jackets with picot back panels to clingy knitted dresses. The ability to touch each piece is crucial for the group standing in front of Lo: every person is visually impaired or blind.
This “touch tour” is organized by Making Fashion Accessible, an initiative of the non-profit Hair & Care founded by celebrity hairstylist Anna Cofone in 2019, which aims to foster greater inclusiveness in the fashion and beauty sectors.
After the tour, guests are invited to sit in the front row of Lo’s show where they are given a pair of headphones that allow them to listen to audio descriptions of each look on the runway as well as a booklet containing samples of the fabrics used in each piece.
“I’m completely blind, so I got a lot out of it,” says Jane Manley, who works as a data analyst at the Royal National Institute of Blind People. “As someone without usable eyesight, I want to feel the energy in the room and hear people buzzing and ahhing when a model walks by. I can connect that energy with the sample booklet and audio description to create a picture of each look in my mind.”
Livi Deane, a model and beautician who lost her right eye to cancer at age 12, says that without the swatches she would “struggle to see texture because my depth perception is quite poor. With the swatch booklet and audio descriptions, I feel like I’m not missing anything.”
Catrin Pugh, a disability campaigner, describes the experience as making her “feel like losing her sight is taking it away”.
Pugh suffers from vision loss due to an accident in 2013 that left her with 96% burns. “I have enough vision to be able to see the overall silhouette of a look on the runway and maybe the colors. So I used the fabric swatches when I could tell I was missing a detail. Having the ability to feel, imagine and feel the details opened up the whole show for me to feel completely part of it.”
Cofone, who has worked with clients such as Dua Lipa and Lana Del Rey, credits growing up with a blind father as the inspiration behind this initiative. “There is a preconceived notion that someone who is blind or visually impaired won’t care about their appearance, and in reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Cofone. “As my father lost his sight, I saw how dressing well really helped him maintain his identity and independence. »
Cofone began by hosting hairstyling and personal care workshops for blind and visually impaired women, then expanded its efforts to try to make fashion week more accessible. “If we think about fashion as a whole, especially runway shows, they really aren’t inclusive. I was already working in the industry, so I started talking with my team about features we could implement to help blind and visually impaired guests create their own visual looks.” Cofone launched Making Fashion Accessible in 2024 and has since partnered with designers such as Roksanda, Erdem and SS.Daley.
Lo has been involved from the start. The New York-born, UK-based designer is known for his tactile pieces worn by Doja Cat and Kylie Jenner. “Visually impaired and blind people are a really overlooked demographic in the industry because many people wrongly assume that they can’t appreciate fashion because they can’t see or experience clothes the same way a sighted person can,” says Lo. “I wanted to prove to other designers that it’s really easy to incorporate this demographic into our work. It’s not difficult to consider what their needs are.”
The purple pound, which represents the purchasing power of disabled people and their households, was estimated to be worth £274 billion in 2023. Yet this is a cohort that is regularly overlooked, particularly in the fashion sector. Physical stores can be difficult to navigate, and websites often fail to include detailed alt text on images that would allow shoppers to visualize the look and fit of a piece. Adaptive features such as braille clothing labels to identify colors and fabrics, and easy closures such as magnets rather than buttons, are also overlooked by luxury designers and the general public.
“I’ve always loved clothes,” says Lucy Edwards, a disability activist and content creator who lost her sight at the age of 17 due to a rare genetic condition called Incontinentia Pigmenti. “Fashion was part of my identity and suddenly I was no longer able to access it. Fashion is also an important part of our culture at large and I felt like I had lost that too.”
Miss Molly, Edwards’ guide dog, sits next to her at Lo’s show, where the feathered looks are her favorite because they are “massively tactile.” She compares the tactile tour to the way she buys clothes: “I feel the cut of a neckline or if a piece is cut on the bias, the type of seam or the length of the sleeves. »
Vix Seffens, a brand strategist with visual impairment due to Stargardt’s disease, describes the event as “a multi-layered sensory experience.”
Stargardt disease is a genetic eye disease: “I had normal vision until I was 11, then it started to deteriorate,” explains Seffens. “That means I can’t drive a car. I can’t recognize someone unless they’re right in front of me. I can’t pick up a newspaper and read it. I need things on a screen to be really big and zoomed in.” As a result, the tactile tour and fabric samples allow Seffens to form a clearer picture of what appears on the catwalk.
“I’m so used to looking at things without really being able to see them,” Seffens says. “Seeing the show is like a puzzle that you can put together in your mind. You felt the fabric on the touch tour, so you also know how heavy it is and how it moves. And for me, I have to see the colors up close. Then you hear the audio, so it’s all these pieces coming together. Suddenly the experience of seeing the show is so much richer.”
Edwards says the experience of attending fashion week and hearing from Lo first-hand makes her more daring in her own style choices. “Before, I wouldn’t have faced colors and textures because I was sticking to an arbitrary fashion law that I had in my head. Now it’s like we can do whatever we want and we can be whoever we want to be. That’s what fashion week is all about. I went blind through no fault of my own, so why should I sit here and be like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to accept that I don’t feel like myself.’ to do that in 2026.”
