‘Fashion can be a really hostile place’
Meet the style trailblazer making space for all bodies
Ben Barry turned 41 last month, but he’s been shaking up the status quo in the fashion industry since he was a ninth grade entrepreneur running an inclusive modelling agency in Ottawa.
Since 2021, Barry has been the dean of fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York. His latest coup is the co-founding of the Parsons Disabled Fashion Student Program, which welcomes its first students this fall.
“Fashion schools aren’t designed to support different bodies and minds,” said Barry.
He became determined to make change from the ground up, to get people with different lived experiences sitting around the decision-making table. “There are barriers around disabled folks,” said Barry, who has a degenerative eye disease.
Even as more brands move into adaptive fashion, disabled persons are usually only involved to give feedback, as testers in the design process. Often, he says, they aren’t seen as designers in their own right, “whether they want to make adaptive fashion or not.”
The idea for the fashion program came about when a U.S. style site published a piece about Barry taking over the top chair at Parsons Fashion. Sinéad Burke, CEO of Tilting the Lens, an accessibility-oriented consultancy — which advises global brands from Mattel to Gucci — slid into Barry’s DMs.
“Ben spoke with such pride about his disabled and queer identities and how, as dean, he had an ambition to create long-lasting systemic change,” said Burke. “That spoke to my mission.” Burke wanted to discover “the ways we could get in good trouble together.”
Disabled people may have long been ignored by the fashion world, but Burke says their potential purchase power is massive. About one billion people worldwide are disabled, she said, about 15 per cent of the population, with a global spending power of
$1.9 trillion. Still, for Burke, any needed shifts are about more than seeing disabled people as potential customers: they need to be involved at every step of the process.
Money was needed: scholarships and cost-of-living funding for the four-year pilot program comes from H&M while a Ford Foundation grant provides money for research and mentorship. The program has a deliberate limit of three students. Said Barry: “Sinéad and I wanted to do it right. Fashion can be a really hostile place.”
Barry has been fighting that unfriendly system since his teens, when he started his modelling agency with nothing but chutzpah.
He must get tired of this origin story, but it’s worth retelling. He stood up for a friend who wanted to model but, at size 12, was considered too big. Barry hustled and made his case until he got her work. That was the beginning of his desire to change the way the system works and who it works for: “I started my career thinking about how the images we see impact how people think they can belong in society.”
Barry kept the agency going with partners while he was in school (U of T undergrad in women’s studies, and a master’s degree and PhD in business from Cambridge). His grad thesis included a study that proved that women are more likely to buy products advertised by women who look like them. He says he realized then that “models are only one part of a much larger systemic tradition of discrimination.”
In 2012, his doctorate newly minted, Barry closed the agency (which had 150 models on its books, all outside mainstream, i.e. size 2 sample size). He moved to Toronto Metropolitan University as director of the centre of fashion diversity and social change, then was named dean in 2018. During his time at TMU, he said, his focus was on changing hiring policies to focus on inclusion, sustainability and decolonization.
Both TMU and Parsons are urban campuses, he pointed out: not academic castles in their own worlds but instead embedded within a city, “surrounded by the range of people that are human, which influences design experience as a student so much, seeing the range of bodies, how people move, different esthetics.”
Outside the academic year, Barry, his husband, Daniel Drak, and their dog, Apple, find balance in life in the seven-hour drive between New York City and the home they bought in Prince Edward County just before the pandemic.
“I think I’m a rural soul at heart and it takes energy for me to be in a city and move through the intensity of urban life, both in Toronto and New York.” The County, he said, “is an amazing space to recharge and feel grounded.”
Has there been change since Barry began sending out model cards of people outside the traditional box? “I think what’s changed is that there is a very active conversation about, and awareness of, diversity,” said Barry. “Brands are held to account by what they do consistently, season after season. Are they promoting healthy, inclusive beauty?”
When Burke attended the Met Gala (in custom Gucci) for the first time in 2019, she wrote for British Vogue: “If you can see it, you can be it. Tonight marks the first time that a little person has attended the gala. It is surreal, inspiring and humbling to be gracing the infamous red carpet.”
Barry applauds every first in representation and points out that the mannequins they made for his Crippling Masculinity exhibit at TMU — which debuted in January — employed 3D models of the actual participants in the study, a joint collaboration between TMU and the University of Alberta. “Clothing is access to life,” said Barry of the effect of the show, which was five years in the making.
But at the end of the day, there has to be a business case for inclusivity, he added: “not just representation but business rationale.” That’s why he did a business PhD, because changing the fashion system from the inside at an educational level is one thing; creating jobs for a more inclusive swath of society has to make business sense for employers to be sustainable.
“We want to see these students carve a path into paid internships, to be hired and promoted,” he said.
That’s the real seat at the table, when fashion is diverse enough to have decision-makers eyeing all that spending power and creating clothing for everyone to express themselves exactly how they want.
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I think I’m a rural soul at heart and it takes energy for me to be in a city and move through the intensity of urban life, both in Toronto and New York.
BEN BARRY