How Do You Wear?
Disability Visibility: Mending the Disabled Experience of Wear
~~~
Senior Thesis Awarded High Honors
September 2024 – April 2025
Shown in Positive Exposure Gallery, Wall Street, NYC September 1 – October 1 2025
Thesis Overview
Because of a vascular malformation I was born with, I’ve used forearm crutches for most of my life. It’s shaped how I move through the world — and how the world, and my clothing, moves against me.
Disabled bodies interact with clothing differently — but most garments aren’t designed with that in mind. Adaptive tools like crutches and wheelchairs create friction points that accelerate wear in specific, repeated ways. For many of us, this means patching, hiding, or replacing clothing long before it should fail.
But the problem isn’t just material — it’s social. These wear patterns become silent markers that we’re not moving through the world the “normal” way. That kind of visibility can feel vulnerable. Many disabled people learn to conceal their tools or the signs of their use, not just for practicality, but to avoid the emotional labor of stares, questions, or assumptions.
My thesis explores this reality through both personal and collaborative lenses. Grounded in critical disability studies, it interrogates the medical and social models of disability while mapping the layered impacts of adaptive devices on clothing, body perception, and social interaction.
Through co-design and material experimentation, I examine themes of wear and care, normalcy and stigma, emotional labor, and the intersection of fashion and adaptation.
This project started with a simple question:
What if wear could be designed into the garment? What if the breakdown became a reveal?
By inviting viewers into my exhibition which was held in Wesleyan’s Zilkha Gallery, my aim was to surface the often-invisible assumptions that shape our interactions with objects, people, and systems. The installation is both a call and a gesture — to see disability not as something to fix or conceal, but as a lived, material, and creative reality that reshapes design, fashion, and belonging.
Sydney Keller 