Fashion For Every Body

Sometimes the best innovations come not from inventing something entirely new, but from reframing an existing industry, product or tool.

Let’s take tailoring—the old-world skill with some overlooked potential. The challenge? The storytelling surrounding it remains stuck in ye olde frameworks that position tailoring as either luxury service or basic necessity. The result? Tailoring is as elitist as it is boring.

At the same time, fashion brands’ content strategies oscillate between so-called ‘sustainability’ messaging and newness or event-based narratives. I know we can do better. In addition to material innovation and recycling technologies we have the opportunity to reshape how consumers think about clothes, bodies, and personal style. With a little creativity and strategic thinking, let’s shift the perception of tailoring from a part-time luxury/dusty service to the sexy little cornerstone of conscious consumption.

Here’s another way to look at it: When I worked on the Adaptive fashion launch at Zalando, we found that approximately 75% of the disabled community surveyed actively uses tailoring services. How many tailoring shops or services do you believe are truly accessible? This stat reveals more than market demand though, it also highlights a very real disconnect between consumer behavior and brand communication. With one in five Europeans living with a disability, and these numbers rising as populations age, we face a clear gap between existing consumer needs and how we talk about fashion services. How many brands do you know that a) talk about tailoring as a service and b) for all bodies?

Consider how we currently frame fashion narratives: endless newness, standard sizes, quick fixes. We create content that still either champions an ideal notion of perfection, or treats bodies as problems to be solved and sometimes celebrates a pretty narrow idea of diversity. This becomes extra clear in adaptive fashion collections, where function totally nukes personality, as if prosthetic requirements instantly diminishes desire for self-expression. We need to go beyond surface-level messaging and fundamentally rethink how we design and communicate value.

I want to live in a world where we modernise not just tailoring services, but also the entire conversation around them for all bodies.

A best-in-class example would have to be (surprise!) Apple's approach to accessible design—they created features designed for disabled users AND they crafted narratives that showed how these innovations benefit everyone. Their marketable benefits and content strategy shifted accessibility from a specific need into a universal innovation.

During my time at Topshop, the design and manufacturing teams regularly redesigned last year’s jeans into this season’s embellished mini skirts. Today, many brands would rather burn old stock than consider upcycling it. Beyond the obvious circularity benefits, redesign would make great storytelling too: behind-the-scenes design team workshopping, transformation videos, before-and-after reveals, tutorials on spotting adaptation potential in existing pieces.

Imagine content that showcases modern tailoring shops as creative desinations, celebrating the stories of clothes evolved over time or partnerships highlighting personalization over fast fashion. Some brands do move in this direction—SOJO, The Seam, Selfridges—but their communication mostly treats tailoring as a sustainability-oriented service rather than a lifestyle shift for all bodies. And customers are bored of the word sustainability anyways.

Maybe instead, this is what fashion could look like when we design it to work for everyone: a system where creativity and craft outmanoeuvre the wasteful pursuit of ‘more’, where inclusion isn't an afterthought but the starting point and hell, where better storytelling leads to better choices.

We don't always need to invent something new.

Sometimes we just need to tell a different story about what's already here.