Natalie Wright

This project recovers a little-known historical moment when fashionable clothing—made by top manufactures and modeled by chic subjects—became central to a project of integrating disabled individuals into mainstream society. The goal was to make wearers “functional,” a concept that brought together the technical construction of clothing with medical and social ideals of rehabilitation. Leaders in the fields of medicine, design, and public policy conducted a national campaign to dress disabled persons in “functional fashions” that they hoped would increase the wearers’ physical and mental capacities. This dissertation locates important designs by and for disabled persons that evidence the ideological links between function and the aesthetics of self-fashioning. By demonstrating the significant role that function played in the social construction of disability in the twentieth century, this study theorizes a foundational concept in design and disability studies.