Since 1998, The Threads Fashion Show has put on a show for fashion and design majors to showcase their skills. This year, for the first time ever, the student designers are featuring a new line of clothing to support students who have disabilities. The line is called adaptive wear.
Adaptive wear is a type of clothing that accommodates and supports people with disabilities. Devin Ricks is a senior at CMU, and he is a designer working on adaptive wear in this year's show. He said adaptive wear is becoming more popular in today's culture.
Ricks said, "in today's age, adaptive wear is very prominent, and kind of like expanding for people within fashion, which is actually really cool because a lot of the stuff is very innovative and almost next level."
Design majors are collaborating with the Disability Studies and Community Inclusion program to create the adaptive wear line. The design students are partnered with two students from the Disability Studies and Community Inclusion program and a student with a disability. The students worked together and created an adaptive look.
Ricks' model has autism, and she is touch sensitive. Ricks said his main goal when designing her outfit was to make something she would enjoy wearing. "I sat down the first time with my model, and I was like, 'so what do you want to wear?' And she was like, 'I kind of like summer dresses that are kind of lightweight and flowy'. I was like, we can do that," he said.
He said, "The dress will be so cool. But the inside is going to be lined with knit cotton, which is essentially like a T shirt. So that the inside of the fabric, when it's on her skin, is not irritating to her whatsoever."
Each designer has a model with a different disability and is responsible for designing a custom adaptive piece for their model.
Ricks said he thinks designers have a responsibility to make clothes comfortable for all people. "Adaptive wear kind of brings out what fashion really is all about. It's not supposed to be tailored to, you know, the tall skinny models that you see on the runway, or the people who have a bunch of money. Every single person in the world wears clothes. So might as well not make someone uncomfortable with what they're wearing on a daily basis, you know? And if they need a need met, then I feel the person who is making the clothes is almost responsible for that," he said.
Ricks said he is also designing a, "nine look collection," in addition to the adaptive wear look.
The Threads Fashion Show will take place on April 15th, at 8PM in the Finch Field House.
*A previous version of this article said the design majors were partnering with special education majors. This has been updated to say they are partnering with the Disability Studies and Community Inclusion program.
