Touch, sound and style: how London fashion week is opening up to visually impaired guests – photo essay

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‘If you put your hands out and run your fingers along this skirt, you’ll feel that there are soft feathers appliquéd on to it,” says the fashion designer Chet Lo. “The skirt is emerald green in colour with black panels on the side and it is designed to be very fitted on the body.” Lo is speaking to a group of six guests ahead of his London fashion week show, offering them a sneak preview of his new collection that will shortly be unveiled on the catwalk.

Chet Lo shows his Night Market collection at the Mandarin Oriental hotel at London fashion week.

Designer Chet Lo shows the fabrics and explains the garments to guests in a touch tour.

The group stands huddled around Lo, listening intently as he talks them through each piece, pausing to pass around everything from jackets featuring spiky back panels to clingy knitted dresses. The opportunity to feel each piece is crucial for the group standing in front of Lo: each person has low vision or is blind.

This “touch tour” has been organised by Making Fashion Accessible, an initiative from the non-profit Hair & Care founded by the celebrity hairstylist Anna Cofone in 2019, which aims to foster more inclusivity in the fashion and beauty industries.

Fabric swatches that visually impaired guests could touch while listening to audio during the show.

After the tour, guests are invited to sit front row at Lo’s show where they are presented with a pair of headphones that allow them to listen to audio descriptions of each look on the catwalk alongside a booklet featuring samples of the fabrics used in each piece.

“I am fully blind so I got so much out of it,” says Jane Manley, who works as a data analyst at the Royal National Institute of Blind People. “As someone with no usable sight, I am all about feeling the energy in the room and hearing people ‘umming’ and ‘ahhing’ as a model walks by. I can connect that energy with the swatch booklet and the audio description to create a picture of each look in my mind.”

Lucy Edwards, Jane Manley and Livi Deane on the front row of the show.

Livi Deane, a model and beautician who lost her right eye to cancer age 12, says that without the swatches, she would “struggle to see the texture as my depth perception is quite bad. With the swatch booklet and audio descriptions, I feel I am not missing out on anything.”

Catrin Pugh, a disability activist, describes the experience as giving her “the feeling that sight loss takes away”.

Pugh has vision loss due to an accident in 2013 that left her with 96% burns. “I have enough vision that I can kind of see the general silhouette of a look on the catwalk and maybe the colours. So I used the fabric swatches when I could tell there was some detail I was missing. Having the capacity to feel, imagine and sense the detail opened the whole show up to me so I could feel completely part of it.”

Cofone, who has worked with clients including Dua Lipa and Lana Del Rey, credits growing up with a father who was blind as the inspiration behind the initiative. “There is this preconceived idea that a blind or low-vision person won’t care about how they look and actually that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Cofone says. “I saw first-hand as my father was losing his eyesight how dressing well really helped him to retain his identity and independence.”

Anna Cofone, the founder of Making Fashion Accessible.

Cofone started by hosting hair and self-care workshops for blind and low-vision women and later expanded her efforts to try to make fashion week more accessible. “If we think about fashion as a whole, especially catwalk shows, they are so not inclusive. I was already working in the industry, so began chatting to my team about what features we could implement that would help blind and low-vision guests create their own visual of the looks.” Cofone launched Making Fashion Accessible in 2024 and has since teamed up with designers including Roksanda, Erdem and SS.Daley.

A model showcases creations from the Night Market collection.

Lo has been involved from the beginning. The New York-born, UK-based designer is known for his tactile pieces that have been worn by Doja Cat and Kylie Jenner. “Low-vision and blind people are a demographic that are really overlooked in the industry because a lot of people wrongly assume that they aren’t able to enjoy fashion because they cannot see or experience clothes in the same way a sighted person can,” says Lo. “I wanted to prove to other designers that it is really easy to integrate this demographic into our work. It’s not difficult to consider what their needs are.”

Fabric from the Night Market collection.

The purple pound that represents the spending power of disabled people and their households was estimated to be worth £274bn in 2023. However, it is a cohort that is regularly overlooked, especially in fashion. Bricks and mortar shops can be difficult to navigate and websites often fail to include detailed alternative text on images that would allow shoppers to visualise the look and fit of a piece. Adaptive features such as braille clothes tags to identify colours and fabrics, and easy fastenings such as magnets rather than buttons, are also overlooked by luxury designers and the high street.

Influencer and blind disability activist Lucy Edwards.

“I have always adored clothes,” says Lucy Edwards, a disability activist and content creator who lost her sight age 17 due to a rare genetic condition called Incontinentia Pigmenti. “Fashion was part of my identity and suddenly I couldn’t access it. Fashion is also a massive part of our wider culture and I felt I had lost that too.”

Edwards’s guide dog Miss Molly sits next to her at Lo’s show where the feathered looks are her favourite because they are “massively tactile”. She compares the touch tour to how she shops for clothes: “I’m feeling for the cut of a neckline or if a piece is cut on the bias, the type of stitching or the length of sleeves.”

Vix Seffens, a brand strategist who has a vision impairment due to Stargardt’s disease, describes the event as “a multi-layered sensory experience”.

The brand strategist Vix Seffens hugs Chet Lo at the show

Stargardt’s disease is a genetic eye condition: “I had normal eyesight up until I was 11 and then it began to deteriorate,” Seffens says. “It means I can’t drive a car. I can’t recognise someone unless they are standing 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 touch tour and fabric swatches let Seffens form a clearer image of what appears on the catwalk.

“I am so used to looking at things and not really being able to see them,” Seffens says. “Attending the show is like a puzzle you are able to put together in your mind. You have felt the fabric at the touch tour so you also know how heavy it is and how it moves. And for me, I have got to see the colours up close. Then you hear the audio so it’s all those pieces coming together. Suddenly the experience of seeing the show is so much richer.”

Preparations behind the scenes for the Night Market collection.

Models try on outfits at the casting for the show ahead of London fashion week.

Edwards says the experience of attending fashion week and hearing from Lo first-hand makes her more daring in her own styling choices. “Previously, I would not have clashed colours and textures as I was sticking to an arbitrary fashion law 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 represents. I went blind through no fault of my own so why should I stand here and be like: ‘Oh, I’m going to just accept not feeling like myself.’ I don’t have to do that in 2026.”

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