SHE WEARS IT WELL
Sinéad Burke is a game-changing disability advocate who counts world leaders, big-house designers and magazine editors among supporters and who is forcing the fashion industry to shift its thinking about inclusivity.
Sinéad Burke is a game- changing disability advocate who counts world leaders, big- house designers and magazine editors among supporters. Following her first trip to Australia, we reveal how she’s forcing the fashion industry to shift its thinking about inclusivity. By Jessica Montague. Photographed by Peter Lindbergh.
Sinéad Burke never imagined she’d visit Australia. Having grown up the eldest of five children in Dublin, Ireland and been born with achondroplasia (a form of dwarfism), long-distance travel, let alone an antipodean adventure, was an unlikely prospect. “And not even because airports and planes are inaccessible,” she says, “but because I didn’t even begin to realise that people in Australia would have some sort of interest in my ideas or what I had to say.”
And yet over three days in October, Burke, who stands just 105.5 centimetres tall, not only made the journey to our shores, she headlined an entire fashion festival where every event she spoke at was a packed house.
To borrow the headline from last year’s September issue of UK Vogue, which was guest-edited by the Duchess of Sussex, Burke is a force for change. She was one of 15 accomplished and inspiring women whom Meghan Markle chose to put on the cover, alongside the likes of Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Ardern and Adut Akech. In recent years, the 29-year-old teacher, academic and disability advocate has not only cracked open the conversation about inclusivity in fashion but punched it into public discourse. As she so perfectly reflects: “So much of this I couldn’t have predicted.”
From an early age, Burke was drawn to the beauty of fashion, as well as its underlying power to showcase her true sense of self to the world. “I saw its potential to shape conversations around identity and culture,” she explains. “[But] because of my disability I was excluded – from the store design and being able to access the clothes I wanted to buy. I felt frustrated that my siblings, who had little interest, could wear what they wanted to illustrate to the world who they were.”
Burke was 19 and studying at university to become a teacher when she started a fashion blog. It was, she says, a response to the fact she’s always been solution-driven and focussed on education. “It became this haven where I could have the conversations and note down the things that interested me about the industry: how it worked, its influence on the world around us, and from there a community began to build,” she recalls.
While Burke’s disability was invisible in the online space, she never deliberately hid it but let it inform her framework for discussing the pitfalls of fashion design. “Being a teacher, my ambition was to learn everything I could about the fashion industry in the hope [it] would provide a different kind of access – in terms of insights and being able to kind of manipulate whatever clothes I could find to illustrate who I was.”
Burke, if turned out, was a natural-born communicator that had been unknowingly honing her delivery for years. Burke’s father was also born with achondroplasia and her parents founded Little People of Ireland in 1998, which offered support to people with dwarfism (and their families) and promoted understanding among the wider community. Naturally, a young Burke assisted where she could. “So my advocacy started almost accidentally,” she says. “With my background in teaching at the time I thought: ‘Why not?’ If I can help have a conversation with people and really emphasise that we’re all different, then why not?”
Her profile only really skyrocketed, however, a few years ago. “I was in New York to help a friend with an event that she was speaking at,” Burke explains. “But just prior she got really nervous and asked me to deliver a speech instead – she didn’t have anything written down, so I was going to have to make something up.” A representative from TED was in the audience and shortly after Burke returned to Ireland, an invitation was waiting for her.
The result was a nine-and-a-half-minute TED Talk titled ‘Why design should include everyone’ delivered in June 2017. In it, Burke offered a short but powerful glimpse into the difficulties of navigating day-to-day life when you’re just over a metre tall. Design, she explained, not only restricts the way she moves about in the world, but also reminds her of her difference and, in some cases, affects her dignity. “It’s the most nervous I’ve ever been for anything,” she admits. “I really tried to believe in the importance of my own experience and that nobody could tell the story better than me because it was my story. The reason I was nervous was because I felt like it really was an opportunity that could change my life. That’s huge pressure.”
A spot at the annual Business of Fashion (BoF) Voices conference that December followed, along with a BoF Magazine cover the following April, shot by Tim Walker, and a turn at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos. In the past 18 months, Burke’s story – and eloquent insight – has reached mainstream media, brands and boards. She has worked with Burberry not only on lessons of customisation, but on redesigning part of its London head office for greater disability access; been welcomed into the fold of UK Vogue by Edward Enninful as contributing editor; and walked the red carpet at last year’s Met Gala wearing custom Gucci. Irish toy brand Lottie even launched a Sinéad doll (sharing Burke’s proportions) to mark World Dwarfism Awareness
Day in October.
Last May, her activism caught the attention of Marie-Louise Theile, creative director of the James
Street Initiative in Brisbane. Its work aims to represent and promote the 130-plus retailers in the Fortitude Valley hotspot and at the time was starting to build the 2019 resort campaign. “In the past we have always looked to present and amplify the precinct with intelligent conversations that we see as reflective of those being had globally,” Theile explains. “This year we cast the net wider to include topics such as community, inclusivity and self-expression.”
A search for a global advocate on such issues revealed that Burke was the perfect candidate to headline the campaign. “Sinéad had not been to Australia before; something that was important to us. For our audience, a retail transaction has become much more. Rather, it is a conversation and sharing of ideas that keeps like-minded people returning to the precinct to experience that point of difference.”
Burke starred in three events over as many days and enraptured the audience at each appearance. She delivered a keynote speech titled ‘Why inclusivity is good for business’, participated in a panel about fashion needing a conscience, and hosted a closed roundtable event with Brisbane’s most influential change-makers and stakeholders about weaving tangible objectives into the local community.
She drove home two key messages through it all. Namely that it is possible for brands to be more adaptable with their design when it comes to customisation for people with a disability. Burke is, after all, a walking example with a wardrobe full of Gucci, Ferragamo, Prada, Burberry and Christopher Kane, all adapted for her proportions (along with local labels Camilla and Marc, Gail Sorronda, Bassike and more, who made Burke looks for her visit). Secondly, she implored all designers, guests and business leaders to always ask themselves: ‘Who is not in the room?’ when decisions about inclusivity are being made. “For me, I still look at what I do as a teacher,” Burke says of her approach. “I look at my role as bringing people along the journey. We should be encouraging them to educate themselves and to broaden what could be possible.”
Burke says her oratory style – which is instilled with humour - takes away any discomfort the audience might have with her disability. “But it still maintains an air of seriousness that’s not selfdeprecating or minimising the importance of these issues. By giving people a person that they can invest in or a part of a story that they can see themselves in – it makes that change much more possible.”
She also inspired fellow advocates in the audience, like 36-year-old Beth O’Brien. Despite having a successful career, a PhD in social psychology and a healthy love for fashion, O’Brien never contemplated advocacy work in the disability space until a year ago. Like Burke, O’Brien has a form of dwarfism that sees her struggle to find clothes for her shorter limbs (she has the rarer diastrophic dysplasia that also necessitates use of a wheelchair).
“For me, learning about Sinéad and seeing her speak and wearing these amazing designer clothes was something I’ve never felt before,” she says. “In terms of having someone who is more like me than the average person and seeing people take her seriously and valuing her in this space … it had the biggest effect on me.
“Obviously Sinéad’s got so much more fashion knowledge and I can’t pretend that I do,” O’Brien continues, “but I’d love to have influence in the Australian fashion world and encourage designers and retailers to consider inclusion in their design.”
Burke connected personally with O’Brien on the ground at James Street Resort (even including her in the roundtable discussion) before jetting out of Australia as quickly as she came. But before returning home to Ireland, she made a pit-stop in Wellington for a meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – a woman she admits accosting in the middle of a corridor at the World Economic Forum in Davos (“I fawned all over her in the most embarrassing way”).
To round out the remainder of 2019, Burke ramped up things with similar gusto. She’s recently launched a podcast, As Me With Sinéad, which sees her have some seriously frank conversations with extraordinary guests. So far, Victoria Beckham, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jameela Jamil have all starred, and Burke appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers to promote it in the US.
“I was that person who was incredibly bold in my ambition,” she reflects on her successes for far. “So to be in a position where I could be that same person to someone else … it’s very humbling.”
Despite fulfilling that incredible dream of one day travelling to Australia, looking ahead to 2020 Burke reveals she is in fact keen to travel less. Not only is this to lessen her carbon footprint, but also because of the physical toll it takes on her body. But that doesn’t mean her ambition has waned or that she isn’t thinking about the next stage of driving her message forward. If anything, it’s the opposite.
“I think we need to figure out how do we create, particularly around issues of inclusivity and diversity, intimacy through technology,” she muses. “So when you’re able to connect with somebody physically in a room, how is that possible through technology? And how do we cultivate it? And also the cost of it. I don’t think we have a solution yet, so I need to dig deep and figure that out.”
“I look at my role as bringing people along the journey. We should be encouraging them to educate themselves and to broaden what could be possible”