A database of news and information about people with disabilities and disability issues...
Copyright statement: Unless otherwise stated, all posts on this blog continue to be the property of the original author/publication/Web site, which can be found via the link at the beginning of each post.
The fashion world has come a long way in recent years, opening the
door, slowly but surely, to a more diverse array of models. Earlier this
month, a model in a wheelchair rocked the runway for the first time at New York Fashion Week during the Carrie Hammer show.
As for racial diversity, Jezebel kept count of models of color
strutting the runway during the Fall/Winter 2014 shows and found that
20 percent of models were not white. However small the number, Jezebel
notes it is slightly larger than seasons past.
As far as van der Putten is concerned, the de Bijenkorf campaign may be a milestone, but not her sole accomplishment.
According to her website, she was a contestant on "Britain's Missing
Top Model" in 2008 and has been featured in Cosmogirl, Elle and Playboy.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.