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CREATING UNHIDDEN FASHION With seemingly insurmountable issues around accessibility in the fashion industry, Victoria Jenkins is creating her own brand, Unhidden, to lead the way in inclusive design.
With fourteen years experience in the industry, what are the biggest issues the fashion industry has around access, representation and inclusion?
There are a number of problems, firstly, they don’t teach you inclusive design in fashion design courses, which is something I think really needs to change. There are people that are trying to persuade change, for example, London College of Fashion are starting to do it, it’s not part of their fully formed courses, but it’s an additional course. It secondly has to come down to allowing disabled people to be able to study design as well.
Hi Victoria, can you tell us about yourself, in your own words?
In 2003 I moved to London to study fashion. Initially my main role ended up being fashion cutting, but then I slowly fell into being a garment technologist, which is about the construction of clothes and how they fit, and making sure that the production is correct and up to spec. I then worked for suppliers and high street brands with my last permanent role being at Victoria Beckham, which I quit in 2017, so that I could focus on Unhidden. Alongside all this, in my early twenties, I had a lot of stomach conditions. I kept going to doctors, but there wasn’t anything that they could really see that was wrong. There were a lot of assumptions that I was ‘young and healthy,’ until an undiagnosed ulcer burst in my stomach in 2012. It was a brush with death, but I made it through, and then it was a slow descent into lots of other surgeries and other things being found. It has been a conflict of my health and my career; it has been the toughest thing to manage, because the fashion industry, famously, isn’t very kind, the hours are quite punishing.
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“THEY JUST DON’T HIRE DISABLED PEOPLE AND THE BUILDINGS ARE OFTEN INACCESSIBLE.” disabilit yreviewmagazine.co.uk
