With the most disabled models ever booked for New Zealand Fashion Week, trailblazing agency All is for All reflects on its runway milestone this week.
For model agencies and their talent, preparation for fashion week is extensive, with considerable practising and coaching required — even more so for a specialist operation like All is for All, when you consider the unique attributes of their talent, who all live with disabilities, things they navigate in daily life too.
These realities can be additional hurdles to the famously complex systems and structures involved in runway events, and indeed fashion at large, as the industry works to evolve and improve representation.
Designers have booked the most models from its books yet — including Chelsea Pita, Rebecca McDonald PLY nee Dubber (pictured), Lara Joy Schilhansl, Pieta Bouma, Brylee Mills, Ari Kerssens, Molly Dennis and Lily-Mae Ivatt.
Ahead of NZFW, which begins tomorrow, we spoke to All is for All’s Grace Stratton, Natalie Robinsons, Rebecca McDonald and Grace Cussell to discuss this milestone for the business, and how they were preparing for this week.
How have you prepared and trained your models for the runway?
We have worked closely with our models, like we do for all projects, and supported them in areas they have voiced to us. We have hosted a workshop with our models, including runway coaching led by one of our staff, who is a model herself and has NZFW runway experience. We want to ensure our models feel empowered to model designerwear well, while also being confident to share their own unique beauty and modelling style.
We’ve also equipped our models by hosting workshops, with wellbeing and holistic guidance. Our team will be on the ground at the shows supporting our models both backstage and attending the shows.
Have designers been accommodating? Have they had any special fittings for the shows?
Our team is led by lived experience, so we understand the impact of when needs aren’t accommodated, so we work with designers to create inclusive spaces for models. This could be a change in fitting location so it’s wheelchair accessible, for example. Or, allowing a model to wear sunglasses for their vision. This year we have put together a ‘how to’ guide for designers with things they can put in place to make their show accessible.
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Advertise with NZME.Those designers who have cast our models have been very receptive to advice from us. It’s been amazing to take great leaps in diversity progress together. We hope that this encourages other designers to join us on this journey — we are grateful for the support of designers and their willingness to make their shows accessible; this includes backstage too.
Moreover, designers have been supportive of making fittings accessible, and we worked with Fashion Week prior [to the event], ensuring venue accessibility to the extent we were able. We remain incredibly grateful to the fashion community for their work in this area.
How about the event itself, what steps has NZFW taken to be more inclusive to people living with disabilities — both on the runway, working in other roles, or attending as guests?
We’ve offered training to all designers to educate them on the effectiveness of including disability representation in their shows and designs. We hope the uptake for this will increase in the coming years as it wasn’t huge this year. Overall, given this is the first NZFW back after a long hiatus with a lot of societal changes, we are happy to have contributed to ensuring accessibility is on the radar for the event and look forward to taking bigger steps in coming years.
All is for All made quite a splash when it launched, and managed to get swift visibility for its models. From that first runway appearance in 2019, following the hiatus and then the return of NZFW this year, what’s changed for your business?
In 2019, All is for All was started with one goal in mind; to change the way the world sees disability. Our team has grown since then from two team members, to now six. We all have lived experience, enabling us to provide our unique insight into a disabled person’s experience for our clients.
Our talent arm has also grown and our business has moved further into consulting, and we have worked with global brands such as Iconic, Zalando and Every Human, to name a few.
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Advertise with NZME.Do you think there has been a shift from designers, and the fashion audience, since then too?
Yes. We appreciate designers giving us the opportunity to work with them and have disability representation as part of their show.
2019 definitely kicked us off with a bang, but the real impact and change come from long-term, sustainable inclusion. This rests with the designers and the infrastructure around them to ensure accessibility is considered in all their work.
Why is it important for people living with disabilities to be represented at NZFW?
One in four New Zealanders identify as disabled. With a quarter of our population being disabled, the impact of true disability representation is huge. Having people with disabilities be part of NZFW provides a more genuine reflection of the New Zealand population.
If you look back through pivotal cultural and societal change movements throughout history, fashion has always played a key role in shifting mindsets. Fashion is a visual expression of identity. This is why All is for All founder, Grace Stratton, chose to begin in the fashion space in 2019. Our goal is to ensure the disabled population is seen as an empowered group with diverse perspectives and talents to offer, not as an inconvenience to society. The latter is still very prominent in today’s subconscious, not in an overtly bias way, but in a generally non-inclusive society that doesn’t cater to accessibility needs.
We hope designers and the fashion industry are realising how much power and ability they hold to lead this change.
How does this representation affect the disability community, and what change can it have?
The NZ Fashion Week runway encompasses what ‘beauty’ means for society at that moment and it flows down through all fashion trends across the industry and especially online in today’s social media-focused world. The inclusion of disabled models means disability becomes part of this idea of what beauty is. We know that representation matters. Not only will disabled onlookers know they have a place in the fashion industry when they see our models, but they will also know they have a place in society’s definition of beauty, which is hugely empowering.
What’s your next big goal for All is for All in the fashion sphere? Anything exciting or notable coming up?
All is for All has been leaning into our consulting work more than our talent work recently, as we can infiltrate businesses more effectively with initial consulting, then bring in talent later as external marketing for increasingly accessible businesses. Beginning with the talent front is unfortunately a not-so-financially-sustainable approach, and so we haven’t been able to grow our talent end as much as we may have liked. We are hoping to find a way to crack this issue in the near future.
It would be amazing to work with more New Zealand designers and brands in not just fashion week, but their campaigns and marketing too. To see a disabled person modelling a New Zealand designer on a billboard, or magazine for example. NZFW is a great stepping stone, it’s time for disabled models to also be part of campaigns during the year. We would love to see some of our models be the face of campaigns for this upcoming summer.
