The makers of 'Britain's Missing Top Model' hope the programme will challenge people's preconceptions about disability. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey
Reality television has spawned all manner of shows concerned with the notoriously bitchy and hard-to-break-into fashion industry.
The "next top model" franchise, which sees lithe beauties competing for lucrative contracts, began in America but has since been picked up in dozens of countries around the world.
In Project Runway, budding fashion designers compete for an attractive prize package which will enable them to start their own design line.
But now the BBC has entered the fray with a programme guaranteed to shake-up the commonly held beliefs about what a person needs to be "model perfect".
Britain's Missing Top Model puts in the spotlight eight beautiful women whose desires to break into the fashion industry are fraught with even greater complications than usual - because they are all disabled.
The series' catch cry "Stylish, sassy, chic ... disabled?" indicates its makers understand the prejudice they are trying to overcome.
Marie O'Riordan, editor of Marie Claire magazine, and one of the judges on the programme, told the Daily Mail her immediate though upon hearing about the show was that it would be "all be women in wheelchairs".
"But I very quickly realised there are many disabled people who are not in wheelchairs, and that is just one of the many preconceptions we all hold about disability," she added.
Danny Cohen, the controller of BBC3, told the Telegraph the series series aimed to challenge the artificial boundaries that seemed to exist in the beauty and fashion industries.
"It would be great if in the future we began to see more disabled models gracing the covers of the world's magazines," he said.
The contestants include a woman who lost her arm in a bus crash, an aspiring film director who suffers from a degenerative neuro-muscular disorder and a woman who is profoundly deaf.
The series will follow the eight women as they live together in a specially-equipped 4m pound apartment, receive expert modelling advice and compete to win a photo spread in Marie Claire magazine.
Jessica Kellgren-Hayes, who is sometimes confined to a wheelchair because of her disability, told thisissomerset.co.uk she applied to be on the show after seeing an advertisement which asked "Are you beautiful and disabled?"
"I thought, 'Yes, that's me'.
"Taking part in the TV programme really strengthened my convictions about myself, that maybe I'm quite cool and doing things right," she said.
Marie O'Riordan told the Daily Mail she believed the programme would help challenge attitudes towards people with disabilities.
"I want to see the winner shake up the fashion industry.
"These young women shouldn't be invisible to the fashion world just because they are disabled."
* Britain's Missing Top Model debuts in the UK today.
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