It was super-exciting to see Hair & Care grab both BBC and ITV news press attention for its work at London Fashion Week 2025. We don’t often achieve such pull for the serious work of our lovely industry! It was heartwarming to see this non-profit organisation being feted for its work supporting the blind and low-vision community. We’ve championed Hair & Care for some time, and this breakthrough with the big media giant is impressive.
Hair & Care does what it says; helping people care for their hair and appearance without relying upon sight. Brilliantly, a collaboration between Hair & Care and three leading fashion designers at #LFW last week ramped up the profile and shared more widely what can be done to make shows more accessible.
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Making Fashion Accessible
With the vision and enterprise of Hair & Care, an initiative called Making Fashion Accessible makes it possible to experience fashion shows through detailed audio descriptions and tactile fabric swatches of the designs being shown on the runway. For London Fashion Week AW25, Chet Lo, S.S. Daley and Roksanda all welcomed blind and low vision guests through Hair & Care, opening up their shows and craft to the sight loss community.
The collaborations are the brainchild of Anna Cofone – a session stylist who founded Hair & Care. As a highly regarded stylist, well used to the pressure of shows, and an accomplished communicator, Anna brings about real progress in sharing visual feasts of creativity with anyone who may not have 100% sight.
How does it work?
For Making Fashion Accessible at these London shows, Hair & Care invited a selection of activists, models, influencers and creatives from the sight loss and fashion communities. They also invited some of the UK’s leading blind charities (RSBC, Victa and Thomas Pocklington Trust), to join.
Touch tours prior to the show mean guests can talk with the designers, feel the fabrics and hear about the decisions that lead to the final look. Equally, the designers have the chance to learn more about the accessibility process, how their collection and designs are visualised and experienced by somebody with sight loss, and the experience a blind person goes through when it comes to considering clothes – allowing a new perspective on how fashion is received by different people.
During the show, guests held swatch cards with fabric pieces and were offered headphones to hear pre-recorded notes from Chet himself describing each look.
Chet Lo’s show and the touch tour had the largest guest list for Hair & Care. It included Jessikah Inaba – the UK’s first blind, black Barrister, who also featured in Vogue’s 2023 ‘Reframing Fashion’ cover series, Catrin Pugh – a visually impaired model and activist, as well as a selection of young blind and low vision guests with a passion to be involved in the industry. Lucy Edwards and RNIB’s Jane Manley were also dressed in archive pieces of Chet Lo’s for the show.
Big news
The BBC ran reportage on its news app and included a film report on the Chet Lo show from @lolaschroer on its broadcast news. And ITV News reporter @annageary joined SS Daley’s Touch Tour for a film reportage on Hair & Care including a conversation with Lucy Edwards, influencer
This is important progress in sharing the work of Hair & Care. And the hope is that publicity breeds more publicity. The Hair & Care team need finances to make dynamic change. The organisation hosts workshops in London – run by volunteers including hairdressers – to meet with guests. The ambition is to upscale to a national network of workshops. And to develop online and social access, If you can help, whether you’re an individual or a brand, please contact: studio@hairandcareproject.com
Visit: https://www.hairandcareproject.com/
Follow: @hairandcareproject
Donate: https://www.hairandcareproject.com/donate
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