Fashioning identity: inclusive clothing design and spinal cord injury

The failure to design clothing to meet the needs of people with spinal cord injury marginalises them through prevention of normal expression of identity and encouragement of discriminatory social perception. Clothing has been designed historically for the standing, mobile figure. It provides the proximal interface for the body and its extracorporeal environments and the medium for expressed and perceived identity. When the body is catastrophically injured, the efficacy of clothing in portrayal of the self is greatly reduced, while its protective function is compromised because it becomes capable of inflicting further harm. Regular clothing, when worn by a wheelchair user, engenders problems in medical, functional, aesthetic and emotional domains, which adversely affect identity, self expression and social perception. An online questionnaire was completed by 100 participants, selected by passive snowball sampling. It was found that many of the needs of people with spinal cord injury were not being met by current available and affordable clothing solutions and that clothing design overlooked key concerns. An analysis of clothing products marketed to wheelchair users revealed inadequate needs analysis and market testing and insensitive use of marketing strategies. Both innovative clothing design and marketing strategies will encourage social inclusion of wheelchair users.