Emily Barker’s playful California style has made her a star on Instagram — but the disabled model is more interested in challenging the fashion business than celebrating it.
With effortless California thrift-store style and a striking pixie haircut, Emily Barker knows how to make waves on Instagram. The 27-year-old artist, model, and actress wears clothes that fall somewhere between subtle and statement-making: semi-sheer ’90s raver tops and hand-bleached pants by upstart Los Angeles label Fear Safe. Yet there’s more to this young person than a pretty face and stellar style.
Barker, who goes by the they pronoun, is a paraplegic who suffers from complex regional pain syndrome , an extremely painful chronic disease. But these labels don’t define them. They are, more importantly, a beautiful, multitalented young person with a burgeoning career that cuts across art, media, and fashion. They don't want you to call their pictures “inspirational”—a weaselly word that they believe is foisted on people with disabilities, undermining the truth of their experiences.
Barker is fighting for a fashion industry—and a culture—in which disabled people are normalized and treated with respect, whether it’s in everyday life or on the runway. “It takes designers who are not going to make a big deal out of it to humanize the situation, and be like, ‘She is hot, she can pop a wheelie on the runway, and that is a moment, and she looks great in these clothes,’” Barker says. “It’s just asking fashion if they really want to ignore 61 million people.
Barker and their cohosts don’t want to center their advocacy on their own disabilities, and for this reason Barker declines to talk about how they became disabled in the first place. They're not looking for pity, but wants to use their personal experiences and everyday struggles to underscore the fact that 61 million disabled Americans are forced to move through a world built for able-bodied people.
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