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Paralympian Alana Nichols Is Facing Her Biggest Challenge Yet: Motherhood as a Disabled Woman


Few could accomplish all that Alana Nichols has: At the age of 36, she’s won three gold medals, traveled the world, had the honor of meeting three presidents, and even become the first female American to win gold in both the summer and winter games, adding the title “history-maker” to her impressive resume. And she did it all from a wheelchair.

Nichols grew up in a small New Mexico town playing sports. By the time she was in high school, she was intent on pursuing athletics professionally, hoping to attend college on a softball scholarship. But during her senior year, Nichols had a snowboarding accident, falling on a rock. She was paralyzed on impact.

Nichols’ plan for her future was snatched away in a second. Just 17, she was left lying in a hospital bed with nothing but time to think. What would she do with her life now? How would she readjust and move forward? “If there was ever a physical feat in front of me that I was presented with, I knew that if I took the right steps, built the right muscle, developed the right skill set, I would be able to accomplish that,” she says. “So, after I became disabled, it was just a matter of time before I became introduced to wheelchair basketball [and adaptive sports].”

As a woman with a disability—even one who’s won gold for her athletic ability—Nichols is used to stigma. “I had to shift my mindset from society’s attitude towards people with disabilities that we’re less than,” she says. But not even her gold medals have inoculated her against the stigmas attached to her next challenge: motherhood as a disabled woman.

A mother in a wheelchair can still take her child for a walk, to playdates, to the park and catch them at the bottom of a slide—but many people seem to believe that because of the limitations those with physical disabilities have, they might be unfit moms. “I travel the world in a wheelchair and ski at 70 miles per hour: How am I not going to be a parent?” she says. If anything, it’s the parenting community that has limitations: Something as simple as the way cribs are designed is restrictive to women who can’t stand to pick their baby up from above.

After she was paralyzed, Nichols spent years familiarizing herself with and learning how to move within her body. And as a professional athlete, she trained just as hard—if not harder—than her able-bodied counterparts, learning to overcome every unexpected challenge her body threw at her. “Parenting is about overcoming each challenge as it’s presented, and we’re kind of masters at that as adaptive athletes. You can’t imagine how you’re going to do it: You just have to go and do it,” she says. “That brings me a lot of solace as a pregnant woman knowing that there’s no way to know how I’ll figure out how to parent, but I will. Instead of deciding what I can and can’t do, how about just being open-minded to the possibilities.”

Gianluca Russo is a New York-based freelance writer published in GQ, Teen Vogue, NYLON and more. Follow him @g_russo1.



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Abby Sams Wanted to See More Disabled Models in Fashion—so She Entered an Aerie Contest


When Abby Sams entered a contest to model for Aerie, she didn’t know that a viral online moment would come with the winning package. The 20-year-old college student, who has multiple chronic illnesses and uses a wheelchair, saw it as a chance to increase representation for disabled women in fashion. “My immediate thought was, There are never disabled models that enter these things, or at least enter and win,” she tells Glamour via email. “Which was then followed by my second thought, [It] wouldn’t hurt to try!”

So Sams completed the contest entry requirements: She filmed a video explaining what “Aerie Real” meant to her (“It means beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, and abilities,” she says), submitted it, and moved on with studying for her finals. She got the news that she’d be starring in the brand’s “Aerie Bras Make You Feel Real Good” campaign in late May. “I was in utter shock,” she remembers. “I literally couldn’t believe it was real.”

PHOTO: COURTESY OF AERIE

Sams joined 56 other women—from brand spokespeople (or Role Models) Iskra Lawrence and Aly Raisman to fellow contest winners, which included a cancer survivor, a woman who uses crutches, a woman with a colostomy bag, and a woman with an insulin pump—for an unretouched photoshoot at Aerie’s Pittsburgh headquarters.

She recalls being impressed by the care that went into making the set accessible to all participants: “The world is an obstacle course [for me], and I was ready to not be able to participate in a lot of things on set,” she explains. “I was beautifully surprised with how accessible they made everything and how much they went out of their way to help me if something wasn’t accessible.”

On July 11 Aerie quietly released photos from the bra campaign on its website. As soon as she saw them, Sams shared the images with her Twitter followers: “@Aerie just sneakily released some of my photos! Look at this disability representation people!!!” she wrote.

Overnight, Sams’ tweet went viral. Her initial post racked up over 24,000 likes and 5,000 retweets.

It’s not hard to see why the Internet had such a strong reaction to those images: The “Aerie Bras Make You Feel Real Good” campaign, which officially launches on August 2, embodies a new level of commitment to portraying “real” shoppers, one largely fueled by actual customers. There are a range of women—at various points on the spectrums of ability, age, illness, and size—represented, proudly wearing the same Aerie bras.

But Sams didn’t anticipate the flood of positive feedback from social media users. “I was initially afraid that there would be a lot of rude comments, since disabled models aren’t really a thing,” she says. “Instead, I was overwhelmed with support and love and so many people saying how much it meant […] that they had someone that looked like them, or had the same chronic illnesses as them, in big media.”

“I’ve had a lot of people with my same chronic illnesses message me and say that finding out we shared illnesses made them feel less alone[,]” Sams says. “It gave a lot of people confidence in themselves and started a fire in a lot of people.”

The campaign has been praised by multiple outlets as an example of authentic inclusion in fashion imagery.

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF AERIE

Sams was a fan of Aerie’s body-positive ethos before modeling for the brand. “Seeing models with stretch marks and belly rolls meant a lot to a lot of people, myself included,” she says of the first #AerieREAL ads from 2014. She believes featuring women with chronic illnesses and disabilities is an even bigger move for the company.

Sams became chronically ill during high school, which was a critical time for her body image and mental health. “I had never seen myself represented after I got sick in media like this,” she says. “When I was younger, I was able-bodied and didn’t really think about it—at that time, I was upset [that] all the models were tall and thin.” She wants Aerie’s campaign to change how able-bodied shoppers perceive women with disabilities: “I want to normalize diversity and disability. I want [people] to see it and know that limitations don’t mean I’m sitting at home, wallowing in self pity. I can do things and have fun and be a model, all while being chronically ill, and that’s normal.”

PHOTO: COURTESY OF AERIE

According to Sams, representing all of their customers in their promotional imagery is just the start of what brands can do to become more inclusive. The in-store shopping experience is often difficult for her—boutique-style stores are too narrow for her to maneuver her wheelchair, and “accessible” dressing rooms are often crowded with furniture for able-bodied guests. “I’m very unlikely to go back to a store if I didn’t feel welcome because I was in a wheelchair or because I couldn’t maneuver through the store,” she says.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF AERIE

Sams sees her appearance in Aerie’s campaign—which will appear both on its website and in its stores—as an opportunity for more brands to recognize their diverse customers and cast their campaigns accordingly. “We’re here. We exist. We want to feel beautiful,” she says. “Aerie really set the bar high with the diversity in [its] models, so I’m hoping I can expect to see the same level of diversity in other brands as well.”

We hope for the exact same thing.

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Sinéad Burke on Why the Fashion Industry Needs More Empathy For Disabled Customers


For most women, shopping is an activity that hardly requires a second thought: You enter a store or go online, you see what you like, you check out, and you leave. For Sinéad Burke, an academic and fashion writer based in Dublin, Ireland, it’s not that simple.

Burke has achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism shared by between 1 in 15,000 to 40,000 people worldwide. She describes a hypothetical trip to the mall as an ultimately discomforting experience: Standing at three feet, five inches tall, she can’t reach many of the racks where clothes are held without assistance—and when it comes time to try something on, she’s not strong enough to pull the changing room door or curtain closed on her own. (Even then, there aren’t often garments tailored to her proportions in mass brands’ stores to begin with.)

“My experience—and my independence—within that experience, is either based on you helping me or getting assistance from those who work in the shop,” Burke tells Glamour at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s annual SCADstyle conference in April, where she was speaking. “But that takes a huge amount of emotional labor for me as an individual, because I have to deliberately make myself vulnerable. It’s that lack of empathy that’s within the process that disables me and further limits my independence.”

PHOTO: John Phillips

Sinéad Burke at the Business of Fashion Voices conference last fall.

The lack of accessible spaces for people like Burke in clothing stores, as well as other venues, were among the topics she discussed in her popular March 2017 Ted Talk, “Why Design Should Include Everyone.” The presentation, during which Burke describes how disabilities are overlooked in design processes from architecture to fashion, has racked up over 1.2 million views since its publication. Though Burke had established a presence online with her fashion and culture blog, Minnie Mélange, her TedTalk catapulted her to international acclaim as an advocate for inclusive fashion and design: She has since delivered a keynote on fashion and inclusion at the Business of Fashion Voices conference (in November 2017) and was the sole female delegate to represent Ireland at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018.

Fashion is essential to Burke: Its communicative powers take on additional meaning in a world that’s quick to pass judgment on her appearance. She also has a lot of fun with it—if you follow her on Instagram, you know she loves to showcase a good look, wearing pieces by Burberry and Delpozo to speaking engagements.

“For me, fashion is not just about buying into a notion or buying something that’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s about confidence and empowerment, but it also facilitates me having to explain myself.”

Burke sees clothing as a tool for combating stranger’s assumptions and biases about her disability: “[S]ometimes, I have to explain that I am older than people think I am, that I am perhaps more sophisticated than people might think I am,” she says, “and when I am dressed the way in which I want to be, I don’t have to explain that.”

In recent years, we’ve seen some brands step up to address the gaping hole in the adaptive clothing market. But Burke takes issue with the function-first approach of many of these collections—”because whilst I want coats to be functional and shoes to be functional, I also want them to be beautiful,” she argues, “and often we forget about those principles about beauty when we are designing for disability. We solely focus on the impairment and making things better.”

Burke says that expanding the current offerings at well-known, established brands to be adaptive is essential to giving customers like her the beautiful garments they deserve. She notes how she’s been approached, “very kindly” by people asking if she’d develop her own fashion line, but she replies: “I’m not a designer. [Creating my own brand] abdicates the responsibility from the fashion industry for providing for me as a customer.”

Burke emphasizes how her disability has no bearing on her sense of style: She’s an adult woman, and she wants access to luxury brands just like everyone else. “As much as we would like to think that we’re not egotistical in our aspiration to have Louis Vuitton or Prada or be embellished by labels, that is part of what we buy into: that history and that legitimacy of the fashion industry,” she says. “We need to step away from this idea that we can create a collection or a line for disabled people, and then create it for everybody else, because it’s further othering the population and segregating us.”

Last fall, Burke gave the keynote address at the 2017 Business of Fashion Voices conference—and she did so outfitted in Burberry. The brand made her a custom trench coat with an asymmetric hem; she gave some input in the design, and Burberry made a few alterations to its existing pattern during fittings. It was a memorable moment for inclusive fashion, in Burke’s experience: “For me, that process was about building a two-way communication system between me and a very heritage, established brand for something as simple as the trench coat,” she remembers. “The question about coming from that dialogue was: How can that insight from me as a disabled consumer impact the design process for ready-to-wear for everybody?”

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PHOTO: John Phillips

Burke wearing her custom Burberry coat at the Business of Fashion Voices conference.

True inclusivity, Burke says, comes down to having representation at all levels of the conversation in fashion, from the C-suite executive level at luxury brands down to retail employees. “It’s just about being more empathetic, as trite as that sounds—and in a very busy world, taking that time to think of others and constantly saying, ‘Who is not being accommodated for? And how can I use my power and privilege to bridge that gap?’,” Burke says. “I think for the process to be holistic, the disabled voice has to be participatory from the very beginning.”

The Savannah College of Art and Design paid for the writer’s travel and accommodations for the purposes of writing this story.

Related Stories:

How Fashion Brands Can—and Should—Address Shoppers With Disabilities

I’m a Woman in a Wheelchair—and I’m Tired of Not Seeing Anyone Like Me on TV

My Disability Made Me Dread Going to Weddings Alone. It Shouldn’t Have.





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