Charlie Allen is a London based designer and bespoke tailor. As part of our London Fashion Week programme, we’ve asked him to give his best fashion advice for less able men and for his insight into how he makes clothes for them. Here’s what he told us:
1. It depends on the individual: “It’s horses for courses – it depends on the individual disability. The client leaves it up to us because they can’t see how they look as well as we can. We change things with every client.”
“We always try and flatter the client. If you’re in a wheelchair you still want to look slim and trim and make your legs look good.
2. Wear short jackets to make sure that you look smart in a wheelchair. “By having a shorter jacket, you can be sure you won’t sit on it. What we do is cut the jacket shorter at the back and slightly longer at the front. This makes sure that from the torso down, you look really smart.”
3. Buy what you want then have it tailored to your needs. “A lot of customers buy off the peg and then bring it to us and we alter it so that they look really good in a wheelchair. Not everything is suitable straight off the rail but you can have it altered for you.”
4. Think about convenience. “You need to go to the toilet so you need to wear something that you can get out of easily and put it back on whilst looking smart.
“With most of the events that we deal with here our clients need evening wear, so they have to be in black tie. You have to look good and you have to wear something that is accessible and easy to take off and put back on again. That means you need a lot of elastication and nothing fiddly, like buckles. Velcro is much better.
“A lot of it is quite akin to the theatre where you have to whip things off quickly and then do fast changes. We do a lot of that with the theatre so that means when we do the less able garments, often, they’re actually very similar.”
5. Don’t compromise on quality. “We use all the same materials that you would have with an able body. We all want luxury. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in. It’s all very tactile. We do feely, touchy things. You want to feel luxury no matter what and a lot of our customers want to feel luxury.
“For instance, a blind customer can’t see but his other senses are very sharp, so he’ll likes the feeling of velvet corduroy that we make, the feeling of cashmere, the feeling of silk and cashmere mixes. If you can’t see you can feel and you can hear. It’s all very important.”
To find out more about Charlie Allen visit his website at www.charlieallen.co.uk