Myla Barnhardt: Fashion, disabled models a perfect fit, student says

From the time she could talk, Holli Flanagan had an answer for anyone who asked about her swollen limbs.

"I was made this way, and it’s OK," she would say in the don’t-mess-with-me tone that she’s mastered over the years.

It was an answer that her parents, Scott and Lynn Flanagan, suggested and rehearsed with her when she was a preschooler, hoping to ward off teasing.

Holli, now 18, was born with lymphedema, a disease in which fluid collects beneath her skin and causes her legs and one arm to swell.

Don’t pander to her and say you hardly notice. She’s a smart young woman. She won’t buy it.

It’s noticeable.

"Potato legs," is how Holli describes them. "They start out relatively slender in the mornings, but as the day goes on they swell."

She spends three hours every day with her limbs strapped into an electrical pump that helps circulate the fluid that gathers.

"It looks like a giant-sized Michelin man," she says.

It just one of many sacrifices she’s made.

At age 6, she gave up competitive swimming after getting cellulitus. Her weakened immune system, a side effect of her condition, is vulnerable to the bacteria that thrives in damp places.

Dancing ended a few years later. The tap shoes were just too painful to wear with her swollen foot.

In her teens, she made the cheerleading squad, but putting herself in a front-and-center role drew unkind comments from her peers. Even a coach at her private school asked her to see a doctor and try to clear up her condition, referring to her swollen legs.

"I gave it up because of the negativity," she says.

But now Holli, a freshman at Appalachian State University, is at a crossroads; and this time, she’s not about to back down or give up her dream.

She wants to be a fashion journalist, but that’s not exactly how she says it. Holli’s tone is a little more emphatic: she will be a fashion journalist. But she has noticed that the fashion industry does not attract many disabled people. In fact, Holli senses that there’s almost a sentiment that disabled people don’t care about fashion.

"People think fashion doesn’t mix with disabilities," she says.

She’s out to prove them wrong, and her chance came when she was assigned to write an argumentative paper for her college English class.

Her argument? I can’t say it better than Holli did, so I’ll just share a few lines from the paper she wrote:

"Recently, fashion magazines have begun including more ethnically diverse and curvier models and cover girls. However, if you peer a bit closer, it becomes apparent that not one of these people has a physical disabililty. In fashion magazines, the reader is catapulted into pages featuring images of ‘normal’ models who pose with all of their limbs present and without the assistance of standing or walking aids, back braces, or wheelchairs. In spite of its great efforts to appear inclusive, fashion journalism is still echoing the discriminatory practices of the fashion industry."

From stores that are not designed to be inviting to people with disabilities, to fashion runways and glossy spreads in magazines, Holli says, there is discrimination in the industry.

And she wants to change that. She’s written letters to the editors of several top fashion magazines.

"As a physically disabled collegiate aiming for a career at a fashion magazine, it is my wish to see this wall come down," she writes.

She believes it’s time for the fashion industry to embrace people with disabilities, and she’s ready to enter the field and shake things up.

Already she’s modeled for fellow student Morgan Taylor, who wants to be a photographer.

In the images, Holli doesn’t hide the black compression bandage that covers most of her right arm and hand.

She loves high heels. Or to say it with the same inflection that Holli does, she really loves high heels, and she doesn’t mind that, in a close-up shot of her foot in a four-inch, peek-a-boo pump, her swollen foot and compression stocking are visible.

She’s lived through the years when she used fashion to cover her disability, and she’s over that.

Her early and mid-teen years were painful. When short dresses were in vogue, she was hiding her swollen legs under skirts that skimmed the ground. At the private school she attended, girls were required to wear knee-length skirts and dresses one day a week. For Holli, those were agonizing days.

But that’s all behind her.

"I don’t have a problem with my disability. Obviously it’s made me a stronger person, but I’m not going to make that speech anymore," she says.

College has been freeing, accepting, and it’s been an atmosphere where differences are more appreciated.

That’s been good for Holli. Uplifting. Empowering.

And it’s given her the courage to speak out, stand up for what she feels is right, pose for cameras without feeling the need to hide her swollen limbs and pound the keyboard to contact decision-makers in the fashion industry.

There’s a market out there, and a growing one, she believes. Holli even talks of designing a line of clothing for people with disabilities. Don’t tell her that a young soldier returning from the Middle East without a limb still wouldn’t want to dress in the latest trends — without having to pin a sleeve or pants leg because of a missing limb.

"Those with physical disabilities should feel no shame in their own skin. We shouldn’t feel the urge to apologize for our differences. Yet, because the fashion industry has put up a wall separating ‘normal’ bodies from bodies in wheelchairs or those with insulin pumps, many with disabilities feel like outsiders, even on their best days," she writes.

Yes, Holli has found her voice and is determined to use it to tear down walls.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if she does it in a nice pair of red stilettos.

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