The Top 5 Adaptive Clothing Companies

By Emily Matchar for Caring Village

A common challenge many aging adults face is the act of getting dressed and undressed by themselves. This can be the result of a physical disability, chronic condition, and/or other restrictions that may come with age. This is where adaptive clothing can be of great help. Adaptive clothing is designed to make it easy to dress/undress by providing easy access to certain body parts without having to fully remove any clothing, making life simpler for aging adults and their caregivers.

What is Adaptive Clothing?

Adaptive clothing is designed with the dressing needs of the elderly and disabled in mind. It’s also important to mention that there are styles and designs unique to each of the challenges someone may face. However, adaptive clothing is most commonly associated with those in wheelchairs. Typically, the adapted features include:

• Velcro-type closures instead of buttons
• Open-back blouses, shirts, and dresses with Velcro-type closures that still retain the traditional button styling on the front
• Lap-over back-style garments with snaps for the individual who cannot raise their arms
• Zippers with easy-to-grasp pull tabs
• Pants with side zippers
• Seatless pants to help with incontinence
• Shoes with Velcro-type closures instead of shoelaces
• Slippers that adjust in width to accommodate swollen feet and ankles

Top Five Adaptive Clothing Companies

There are many adaptive clothing companies available but not all have big, brand names. To help you navigate the adaptive clothing industry, below is a list of the top five companies:

Adaptive Clothing by Silvert’s

Silvert’s understands the routine physical dilemmas faced by many in the daily chore of dressing. As a result, Silvert’s design department continually consults with clients, caregivers, and health care professionals to meet the daily needs of their customers. The design department has incorporated style while focusing on the challenges faced by those with decreased levels of mobility, arthritis, scoliosis, podiatry concerns, and incontinence issues. Silvert’s has one of the largest collections of clothing for both Women and Men.

Izzy Camilleri Adaptive Clothing

The IZ clothing collection is a line of fashionable and functional clothing, created to make wheelchair users look and feel amazing. The collection has signature cuts and styles for a seated body, which fit better, look nicer, and feel more comfortable than standard mainstream clothing, all without interfering with wheelchair mechanics. They use quality fabrics, which have been selected for stretch and durability. IZ garments are created ethically in customized studios, where every consideration is made so that the end-user gets the best possible product and service.

Able2Wear

Able2Wear is a supplier of wheelchair and adaptive clothing for all ages and all degrees of ability. If you’re looking for clothing that is skillfully designed and made, and brings confidence and comfort to the wearers, Able2Wear clothing is a great solution. Able2Wear provides clothing for people with spinal injuries, chronic and progressive illnesses, stroke, and other severe conditions.

Adaptations by Adrian

Adaptations by Adrian offers a wide range of clothing and accessories. Unique items, such as the bus pass/cell phone holder, arm warmers, swimsuits, and stylish boots can be found there, made for people of all ages. They offer variety of special needs clothing including fashionable adult bibs and clothing protectors, back-opening wheelchair shirts and wheelchair jackets, hook and loop closures on wheelchair pants and lounge-wear, wheelchair capes and accessories, as well as specialized foot and winter wear.

Easy Access

Easy Access makes adaptable clothing for men, women, and children. Clothing in a variety of styles, colors, and fabrics, have been chosen to increase independence, maintain dignity, and make the wearer look good. Their mission is to make the most practical, functional, highest quality, and most fashionable collection of clothing and products for the disabled consumer available today.ritis, scoliosis, podiatry concerns, and incontinence issues.

Adaptive clothing is available should you or your aging loved one need it. Take a look around and see if any of these companies or clothing options are right for you.

“Adaptive design” it’s called, regular clothing and shoes re-engineered for children and adults with physical, cognitive or sensory issues, both chronic and short-term.

Elastic, snaps, magnets, large buttons, zippers, drawstrings, and Velcro fasten everything from dress shirts and raincoats to swim trunks and pajamas. Spine-length back zippers on jumpsuits deter stripping by people with dementia or autism issues. Onesies have concealed openings for abdominal access. Dresses, shirts and hoodies have two angled front zippers for access to chest ports, catheters or PICC lines used for medicine infusions. Cozy fabrics, flat seams, tag-free labels and the lack of back pockets prevent sensory distress and skin injuries. Sneakers with zippers and fastener closings make shoes more manageable.

Tommy Adaptive

Tommy Adaptive puts a new twist on tradition, delivering modern style with innovative modifications that empower people and make dressing easier.

Nike created the FlyEase, an easy-on zippered athletic sneaker inspired by a letter from a teenager with cerebral palsy who struggled with regular sports shoes. The company now makes the shoe in men’s, women’s and children’s sizes.

But while the large companies are only starting to see the potential of adaptive clothing, smaller retailers have been targeting the market for years.

Sasha Radwan, founder of SpecialKids.Company, was inspired to launch the online adaptive clothing retailer after learning about an extended family member in her parents’ native Egypt who was disabled. She was institutionalized at 18 and died 10 years later.

“[My relatives] do remember her, but don’t speak about her,” Radwan says.

After leaving a corporate job, the Australian-born Radwan wanted a career that gave back. So she tried to think of something that would help people with disabilities be better integrated into society.

“There was a big gap in the clothing market where the needs of these children were not being met,” she realized.

Radwan launched SpecialKids.Company in 2013 with the tagline “Where every child should be seen and not hidden.”

SpecialKids.Company sells clothing for kids with a variety of physical and mental challenges. There are one-piece suits that help keep children from accessing the contents of their diapers, a common behavior among children with certain developmental delays. There are garments with flaps on the midsection for accessing feeding tubes. There are socks with loops to help children with coordination problems pull them up.

“We design the garments around what parents want for their children, what occupational therapists are asking for, what children are saying they’re most comfortable in,” Radwan says.

Importantly, the designs are age-appropriate. While a 12-year-old may need to wear a one-piece garment, they likely wouldn’t appreciate one that looks like a baby onesie. So the clothing at SpecialKids.Company have stylish details like polo collars and raglan sleeves.

Kevin Iverson appreciates the consideration. A 49-year-old in the UK, he has various lifelong disabilities. Before finding SpecialKids.Company, he would scour the web for garments adapted to his needs. He struggles with incontinence and has a short stature. Though the company specializes in kid’s apparel, he finds their clothing a perfect fit.

“I’ve wasted a lot of money trying to get the correct clothing,” he says.

Other adaptive clothing companies focus more on high-fashion. Russia-based Bezgraniz Couture has shown their fashion-forward adaptive designs at fashion weeks across the world, featuring models who were amputees, in wheelchairs, had Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. British designer Lucy Jones has won numerous accolades in recent years for her “Seated Design” collections created for wheelchair users, including designs for garments like pantyhose that are difficult to get on for even the most able-bodied wearers. To create her designs, Jones had to take into account things like how seams might chafe legs constantly in the seated position, and the angle of the pelvis when seated.

Thinking about fashion in these new ways can be an innovation challenge. For nearly four years, designers, engineers, occupational therapists and people with various disabilities have gathered at Open Style Lab, currently sponsored by Parsons School of Design, to create disability-friendly clothing that doesn’t sacrifice stylishness. Each summer the team produces bespoke outfits for four or five people, who have disabilities ranging from nerve sensitivity to paralysis.

“Dressing is such a basic and intimate need,” Open Style Lab co-founder Grace Teo told CNN. “We hope to restore the independence and dignity of dressing to people with disabilities.”

In 2014, designer Mindy Scheier launched Runway of Dreams, a nonprofit that promotes inclusive clothing design. Scheier was inspired by her son Oliver, who has a form of muscular dystrophy. Oliver wanted to wear regular jeans to school like his friends, but couldn’t find any that fit properly over leg braces and were easy to get on and off.

“Wearing sweatpants every day makes me feel like I’m dressing disabled,” Oliver told his mother, as she recounted in a TED Talk.

Researchers have recently coined the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the impact that clothes have on mood and health.

Adam Galinsky, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, studies enclothed cognition. He led a 2012 study, which showed that undergraduates randomly assigned to wear white “doctor’s coats” did significantly better on cognitive tests than undergraduates not wearing the lab coats.

“Clothing affects how other people perceive us as well as how we think about ourselves,” Galinsky told the New York Times.

With more than 1 in 10 Americans having some type of disability (some studies put the number significantly higher), and those numbers rising as people age, adaptive fashion is clearly a growth industry. It’s up to designers and manufacturers to make sure people of all abilities have clothes that fit their needs, including their personal style.