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Tag: Style

Fashionable gifts for people of all abilities. problem solved.

It’s such a great feeling when you know you’ve finally found the perfect gift for that hard-to buy-for someone on your gift list. The frustrating conundrum as to what to get for the person who has everything, is often solved with a food gift basket, novelty items, or, for the gift that proves you just flat gave up, a Starbuck’s gift card. But the question, “what do you get for a friend or loved one with a disability?” can be even harder to answer, because there may be some specific needs that must be taken into consideration when selecting a gift. You may be plagued by doubt, wondering if your gift is appropriate, or even usable, given your recipient’s specific circumstances.

Finally, there’s a place to go where you can get gifts that are fashionable, functional, and in many cases, designed by people with disabilities. Patti+Ricky is a one-stop shop for stylish apparel and accessories that are inclusive of everyone. Whether you walk, tap, or roll, these clever items have universal appeal. No longer are you limited to shopping at a medical supply outlet, or settling on daily living aids or in-home care items. At www.pattiandricky.com you will find top-quality products designed by problem solvers who are living the experience for which they have created solutions.

Gifts for the guys:

These flannel shirts have hidden magnetic closures that make dressing effortless for anyone who has manual dexterity issues due to arthritis, neuropathy, or, in the case of the designer’s husband, Parkinson’s des ease. MagnaReady is a line of apparel that looks, feels, and wears like any other clothing, but without the frustrating closures that can make getting dressed a challenge.

Photo of a burgundy flannel shirt, folded.

Photo of man wearing a long sleeved burgundy flannel shirt and khaki pants with hidden magnetic closures.

Whether your gift recipient is ready to relax or ready for the office, MagnaReady apparel will have him dressed and ready for anything from desk to dinner. Shop magnetic shirts here.

When people think of disability, they naturally tend to think “disability” translates to “inability.” In fact, at one time or another, most of us could use a little extra support. Whether you’ve sprained your ankle, had a hip replacement, or are working through physical therapy for any number of reasons, you might find yourself, or a loved one, in need of a balance or support cane. Wouldn’t it be fun to use one that suits your style? With Lorraine’s Canes, you can not only feel confident with a trusty cane by your side, but you can look fabulous, too. These artisan crafted, hand-painted canes are just your style, because they can be made to your specifications! Love animal prints? Flowers? Unicorns? You can have a stylish support cane that also supports your style profile.

Photo of a walking cane painted with a sparkly unicorn.

Photo of the paint-a-cane kit attached to a white cane.

Lorraine’s Canes are even available in a paint-your-own option, which is a complete kit that the grandkids can paint, and give to Grandma or Grandpa. Now, THAT would be the hit gift of the holidays! Shop Lorraine’s Canes here.

Love a little bling? Jewelry lovers who have low or no vision can adorn themselves with jewelry that says something about what they value…literally! Elegant Insights offers a distinctive collection of jewelry and accessories that are all handcrafted, made in the USA, and embossed in crisp, readable braille! Make a stylish statement without saying a word.

Photo of a heart pendant, bracelet, and earrings in copper with rose quartz and copper beads.

Photo of a brass and copper necklace featuring a disc braille embossed with "believe."

Elegant Insights jewelry is beautiful, unusual, accessible, and inclusive. Shop Elegant Insights here.

Patti and Ricky is an online marketplace consisting of products created by over 70 vendors. You’ll find everything from adapted swimwear to PICC line sleeves to pretty ostomy pouches. Have a friend or loved one who is post-surgery, and could use a lift? Forget about the flowers and bring a beautiful gift that is stylish and useful for anyone, whether their circumstances are temporary or ongoing. If you need advice or want to submit a suggestion, CEO and founder Alexandra Herold has you covered. This year, give a gift that can be both beautiful as well as practical. Then, remember Patti and Ricky for birthdays, Mother’s or Father’s Day, or, best of all…just because! Shop til you drop this season with Patti and Ricky.com!

LL

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Zappos Adaptive and Runway of Dreams present a livestream inclusive fashion show

Every season, the fashion industry rolls out what is hoped to be the next big wave of style trends, whether in apparel, accessories, hair or makeup looks. While prestige brands seek an upscale clientele, most fashion innovations are reinterpreted for the mainstream. Unfortunately, what constitutes “the mainstream” in fashion typically leaves out people with disabilities. Finally, the fashion tide is turning in our direction.

You probably already know of the online retail fashion destination, Zappos.com, but you may not be aware that the company also has a team devoted to making apparel and accessories inclusive of everyone. Zappos Adaptive features products that make a critical part of everyday life easier – getting dressed. Throw away the old ideas about adaptive clothing, though. No longer are people with disabilities forced to settle for garments that are as fashion-forward as sweats or hospital scrubs. Now, you can find stylish clothing by brands you know. To prove it, Zappos Adaptive and Runway of Dreams have collaborated on a ground-breaking fashion show just for people with disabilities, and you’re invited.

Be part of the growing movement that brings together fashion leaders, innovators and the disability community to experience the evolution of adaptive apparel and inclusive design with Zappos Adaptive and Runway of Dreams Foundation! Together, they will host the first, live-streamed fashion show in Las Vegas featuring 30 models and influencers with disabilities to showcase sporty, casual and evening wear looks that are functional, fashionable, and make getting dressed easier. It’s a celebration! Cocktails and hors d’ oeuvres will be served.

Donations and proceeds from the event will benefit the Runway of Dreams College Club Program, which is bringing positive visibility to disability by showcasing students with disabilities modeling Zappos Adaptive products and advancing the inclusive fashion movement on campuses across the country.

The event will be hosted by actor and model RJ Mitte, best known for his role on “Breaking Bad.”

WHERE: Symphony Park at the Smith Center Las Vegas
361 Symphony Park Avenue, Las Vegas, NV 89106

WHEN: Wednesday, March 27, 2019 | 5:00PM – 7:30PM
Doors Open | 5:00PM
Cocktails & Hors D’oeuvres| 5:00PM
Program & Runway Show | 6:00PM

HOW: Tickets can be purchased on Eventbrite.
· General Admission ($100) includes reserved seating, cocktails, and hors d’oeuvres.
· VIP Tickets ($250) include VIP seating, a private bar, hors d’oeuvres, and a swag bag.

About Runway of Dreams Foundation:
Runway of Dreams™ Foundation works toward a future of inclusion, acceptance and opportunity in the fashion industry for people with disabilities. We live our mission by developing, delivering and supporting charitable programs that break down stereotypes and empower people of all abilities with confidence, independence and style through a movement of inclusion in the fashion industry.

About Zappos Adaptive:
The Zappos Adaptive mission is to provide functional and fashionable products to make life easier. We are an online shopping experience offering clothing and shoes from innovative brands with unique features that address a variety of needs.

Here’s the link to the event livestream.

I’ll be covering the event for The Fashionability Channel, so be sure to watch for pre and post event coverage.

LL

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A collaboration spanning two continents: An interview with the fashionable Emily Davison

After posting the news about my newest venture, the Fashionability Channel, on which I am collaborating with Emily Davison of Fashioneyesta.com, I thought I would tell you a bit more about her. I asked Emily to answer some questions about her current work and her background in the fashion industry. Emily, in turn, will post an interview with me on her own blog, the link to which I will add at the end of this post. If you think you, or someone you know, might be interested in the content offered on the Fashionability Channel, please read on so as to get to know my partner a bit better. She is smart, funny, full of life and a strong advocate for people with disabilities.

LL: Please share a bit about your current projects, and what you spend the most time working on.

Emily: I have been involved in many different projects, many of which are related to fashion and cosmetics for people with sight loss.

Some are still currently in preparation and therefore I cannot say too much about them. But, I am doing a lot of work around campaigning for braille on cosmetics products and have worked closely with one particular company who will be launching braille on their products in the future.

I have been working very closely alongside the charity Living Paintings, a charity that produces tactile, audio guides on different aspects of the visual world. From fashion, science, nature, art to cookery they are all included. The fashion guide is what I have predominantly been working on and have been advising the charity on how to best explain fashion concepts to visually impaired people.

I have also been campaigning with a team of dedicated individuals with the organization Models of Diversity to target fashion brands to add models with disabilities to their advertising campaigns.

I am an avid writer and spend a lot of time writing blogs and articles around fashion, identity and disability. I cross network with other websites and blogs and am passionate about changing stereotypes surrounding disability.

LL: How was Fashioneyesta born? What was your inspiration, and what are you most proud of?

Emily: Fashioneyesta was born from a concept to make fashion and beauty more accessible for people with sight loss. One day when going about my business I encountered my first ever comment of someone remarking that I ‘didn’t look blind.” So, this got me thinking about creating a space that I could spread ideas, positivity and hopefully break down this stereotype that surrounds not just sight loss but disability in general. I didn’t want people with sight loss to be considered as being unfashionable, nor did I want people with visual impairments to not have access to information and ideas about how they can develop their own sense of style.

Fashioneyesta has grown in the last two years and I am extremely proud of how far it has come. It has enabled me to meet so many wonderful inspirational people, charities and fashion professionals. On a regular basis I get people emailing me to tell me how it has helped them to develop their own sense of style and in turn their confidence. But, I suppose my biggest achievement that it has helped me accomplish is that this year I am due to be featured in Pick Me Up Magazine here in the UK and I have also been shortlisted for the Young Persons Achievers Award by Guide Dogs UK.

LL Tell me a bit about your background and interest in fashion. How did you get into the business?

Emily: Fashion was always something that I had a deep passion for, I grew up in a very fashion orientated household. My mother worked for a cosmetics company, my aunt worked on the stage in her younger years and my nan is an avid buyer of clothes, cosmetics and jewelry. My early memories are of my mum when I would see her curling her hair and adorning makeup for work. Fashion was something I grew up with. By the time I was 15 I was writing fashion articles for my school magazine. When I was 18 I had obtained a scholarship to study English Literature and my passion for writing intertwined with my flare for fashion and so I started my blog and the rest is history.

LL: How would you describe your personal sense of style?

Emily: I would describe it as both classic and adventurous, my style is essentially feminine but with different twists depending on my mood. One day I may choose to go down the 1950s route with a full circle skirt, but updated with a statement necklace and brightly colored sweater. On another day I may choose to opt for something a little more oriental, wearing a kimono and jeans. My style embraces classic cuts and styles like the 60s dress, but incorporates aspects of modernity into them.

LL What do you hope to achieve with the new project, Fashionability?

Emily: So much, I really want to use Fashionability as a place to spread positivity and ideas throughout the disability community in engaging fashion. I want to create a space that opens up a whole new world to people and is a place of inclusion. I want this space to be something that causes change in the fashion industry and convinces brands that disability is not something to be considered as external to fashion.

I want to use all of my knowledge, contacts and resources to make this a project that gives all people with varying disabilities the confidence to use fashion to create their own sense of style and with it there own identity. That is the crux of it I suppose, style gives people their own unique identity and that is what I want people to have and not to be characterized by what society believes them to be.

LL: What do you see as problematic for men and women who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise disabled in fashion? What do you think are the most significant barriers, if any?

Emily: I think there are barriers that people with sight loss and other disabilities have to overcome. To begin with there is the fundamental fact that people with disabilities are not equally represented in the fashion advertising industry. This immediately creates problems for people with disabilities as it shows society that disability is not considered to be relevant to fashion and thus all these unfair stereotypes occur.

There are others surrounding accessibility and whether a shop or online store are made accessible to their visually impaired and disabled clientele. Many companies in the cosmetics industry do not incorporate braille onto their products which causes further inconvenience to visually impaired people when trying to access products. What’s more I also thing that in general companies need to provide better disability awareness training and need to provide further resources such as braille, audio and large print catalogues to their visually impaired customers to make it easier for visually impaired people to access fashion.

LL: What are the ongoing plans for Fashionability? How do you hope to reach an audience?

Emily: Fashionability is currently being planned and organized by Laura Legendary and myself. We are currently working on content, schedules, ideas and ways of interacting with our audience. We hope to engage with our target audience by promoting what we do via social media sights such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs. What’s more, I hope to use all of my media contacts and charity contacts to spread the word about what we are doing. I want to cross link with disability charities such as Scope, as well as working with organization’s such as Models of Diversity to promote what we are doing.

What’s more, I hope to feature Fashionability on media publications and websites that I have or am currently partnered with. In particular I aim to showcase the channel on the Royal National institute for the Blinds Insight Radio. Which is a UK based radio station created by the Royal National Institute for the Blind for people with sight loss. It is the first channel in Europe to be dedicated to people with sight loss and covers a range of topics from lifestyle, technology, music and health.

LL: What else would you like my readers to know about you?

Emily: Aside from fashion and literature, what many people don’t know is that I am an avid astronomer and was the first visually impaired person to qualify with a GCSE (General Certification of Education) in Astronomy from the Greenwich Royal Observatory in the UK. I also do a lot of volunteer work for Guide Dogs UK and am very keen to help charities. I am also a journalist having written for the Guardian and Huffington Post and I am also an avid disability campaigner.

I am a real animal lover and an advocate of animal rights, I am against Animal Testing for cosmetics and regularly advocate this on my blog. I am a huge fan of companies such as Lush who promote the welfare of small charities and make wonderful fair trade, cruelty free beauty products. I am a self acclaimed spend thrift and I enjoy treating myself after lots of hard work.

My thesis on life as a Classical Liberalist is to allow people to experiment with their life and unless they are hurting anyone else, to allow them to make their own choices free from control. I am a strong believer in the power of autonomy and free will and one of my pet peeves is when people try to convince others to their way of thinking. One thing I will never do on my blog is to try and persuade people to my way of thinking about style. I give them advice on different looks and how to recreate their own. But, I love creativity and that is something that fashioneyesta.com thrives on.

I hope to finish my degree in English Literature and move on to study for a Master’s degree in children’s literature. After that my goal is to write children’s books and to continue writing about fashion, style and cosmetics for people with disabilities. The one thing I want to do in life is to make others happy and to give people the chance to feel the same way I do. Many people forget that happiness is something they have to right to feel and I want to remind people of that.

Here are Emily’s social links:
Blog: fashioneyesta.com
Email: fashioneyesta@gmail.com
Twitter: @DavisonEm
Skype: fashioneyesta
Instagram: fashioneyesta2012
Audioboo: ?audioboo.fm/fashioneyestaInstagram: ?instagram.com/fashioneyesta2012
Facebook Page: ?www.facebook.com/Fashioneyesta
Facebook group: ?m.facebook.com/groups/5494521…eBayStore: ?myworld.ebay.co.uk/emilykd94?_
Pinterest: ?pinterest.com/emilykd94/Tumblr: ?davisonem.tumblr.com
YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/user/fashioneyesta
Second YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCX-t0TXzskGxFvNlzPT1DaA
Tumblur: davisonem.tumblr.com
Emily appears on RNIB’s Insight radio at 2.15 pm every Friday.

Please join us for the launch of our new project, the Fashionability channel! I’ll post the official press release in a few days.

If you would like to read Emily’s interview of me, you can find it here:

is.gd/nb5Su7

LL

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A very stylish partnership to launch a guide to accessible style

At the end of last year, I began working on my marketing plan for 2014, intent on growing my small business, Elegant Insights Braille Creations, (@ElegantInsights). I had a long list of ideas I hoped to execute, and one of them was a plan to offer some sort of adjunct to the current web site, providing greater access to information about fashion and style for consumers who have a disability. My original thought was to expand the Elegant Insights Audioboo account by creating a channel on the Audioboo platform, not unlike that of the Blind Abilities channel. My hope was to invite contributors to add their expertise in other areas of fashion, such as hair care, cosmetics, career wear, skin care, and tips on fitness and nutrition, shopping, grooming, and how-to-wear new styles and trends. Of course, I am not a subject matter expert here, but I know others who are, and I thought about a list of possible content contributors I wanted to invite to join the channel.

Unfortunately, I lacked the cooperation of an important player, Audioboo. They wanted what I considered to be a prohibitive fee per month to establish the channel, and unless I was able to find a sponsor, I wasn’t sure if I could pull this off. Further, I wanted to do some additional market research, to learn what potential listeners of my channel might feel was missing from the accessible fashion landscape.

To that end, I created a survey, which I just called the “accessibility of style,” and began to send it around to people on my various Twitter lists. Then, I expanded the survey to include other followers on Facebook, then sent it around to a variety of mail list servs and newsletters.

The response was amazing. The number of respondents quickly overwhelmed the limits imposed by my no-cost plan with Survey Monkey, so a half-dozen different surveys were circulated at once, until one hit the respondent limit and another link had to be generated.

No statistician or marketing guru I, the survey was a simple, unscientific, ten-question affair for the purpose of helping me to determine how I might better serve the blind and otherwise disabled communities. The survey consisted of a few demographics questions, a few general questions about personal style, and a few questions about some of the barriers that may prevent access to current style and fashion information. The final question was an essay-style question, and I was very surprised by the length, depth, and scope of the responses. Almost to a person, an outpouring of relevant data was generously supplied as to what a respondent wanted to see to improve access to fashion and style, for both men and women. I was floored.

It has taken some months, but I am delighted to announce the launch of my latest project, a very stylish collaboration with Emily Davison, (@DavisonEm). Davison is the founder of a blog entitled Fashioneyesta, at www.fashioneyesta.com. For my screen reader users, that is spelled with an e y e s t a, instead of the typical spelling, fashionista. I had been following Emily on Audioboo for some time, and was impressed by her approachability, her passion for her topic, her experience in the fashion industry, her connections to fashion and style-related charities, and her work ethic. I approached Emily with the idea, and she was extremely enthusiastic.

Our first order of business was to decide what sort of audio offering to create. We both wanted to explore setting up an Audioboo channel, as a large blind community was already using the platform. However, we did not relish paying the $50 per month premium. We believed so strongly in the idea of serving the disability community, and creating a community channel, that we decided to campaign Audioboo for assistance. Audioboo permitted us a free regular account, providing some extra recording time, as a way to establish our brand and to build an audience. Reluctantly, we agreed to this compromise, although we really wanted a full-blown channel. Persistence paid off. Just a few days ago, we were notified that we had been granted a full channel.

Our new venture is called Fashionability. Think of it as a guide to accessible style. We plan to cover a great deal of ground as we explore many aspects of the fashion world, all with an eye on inclusion. We have some fabulous contributors lined up for interviews and special information segments, topics suitable for people of all shapes and sizes, the trendsetters and the clueless, from all walks of life, inclusive of all disabilities, and for both men and women. We hope you join Emily and I in this exciting new venture. We plan to launch next week, as London Fashion Week begins. Coming in the next few days, I will post an interview with Emily, as well as a post that will include the official press release.

Here are all the requisite social links:

The Fashionability Channel: Your guide to accessible style.

audioboo.fm/channel/fashionability

Follow us on Twitter @InclusiveStyle

Find us on Facebook at:

www.facebook.com/fashionabilitychannel

Check out Emily’s Fashioneyesta posts on Audioboo:

audioboo.fm/fashioneyesta

Don’t forget about the Elegant Insights “audioboo-tique” at:

www.audioboo.fm/ElegantInsights

Finally, thank you so much for your response to my survey on accessible style, if you submitted one. Your thoughts were such an inspiration, and I hope that we can provide some much needed access to information for a better quality of life for everyone. Please tell your friends about Fashionability, and stay tuned for more news and launch updates.

As ever, your servant, LL

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