What a relief to see a disabled catwalk model

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/13/disabled-catwalk-model-weird-wonderful

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Sometimes you don’t truly realise how invisible someone is until you eventually see them. You go through life presented with an endless parade of uniform faces and body types, barely questioning their homogeneity until, one day, you see something different and realise just how bland and unrepresentative the visual culture that surrounds you actually is. That’s how I felt on seeing pictures of Jamie Brewer, a model and actor with Down’s syndrome, on the catwalk at New York fashion week. She may have been part of a show called “Role Models Not Runway Models” rather than Calvin Klein’s spring/summer show, but any kind of visibility for disabled people in an industry that usually renders them invisible is, I think, progress.

You may be dismissive of the fashion industry, believing it frivolous, sat in your fleece. But like me you are a consumer of images. At some level you must be aware that we have a problem here. Human life is eclectic and diverse and for fashion designers not to reflect that, to rely instead on the standardised body type of a 14-year-old undernourished girl, while simultaneously claiming to be artistic visionaries, makes no sense. How can you be creative and boundary-pushing when your sphere of interest is so small that it fails to account for most of humanity, with all its eccentricities and imperfections?

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It’s not just fashion, either. It’s rare that you see a person with a disability on screen – unless it’s in some exploitative Channel 5 documentary, as excellently parodied in Mitchell and Webb’s The Boy with an Arse for a Face sketch. It’s rare that disabled people are asked their views on politics on news programmes, even in vox pop form, which, when you consider just how many disabled people there are in the country, as well as how reliant news programmes are on vox pops, is an absurdity. It’s rare that you see a disabled politician or TV presenter. Everyone gets very into the Paralympics when they come around every four years, and I always feel briefly encouraged, until everything goes back to “normal” and disabled people become invisible again.

If you are disabled yourself or spend a lot of time around people with disabilities you notice these things. The absence of difference in visual culture becomes notable. And that’s before you get to the people with hidden disabilities. My severely autistic brother is astonishingly good looking. “He could be a male model,” people who have never tried to take a photograph of him will say (he scrunches his whole face up when you point a camera at him). Care workers tell us that girls check him out on the street, only to quickly avert their eyes when he spontaneously starts pogoing and shrieking like a seagull. It makes me laugh. That’s rare too, of course – the dark humour of disability. It will be familiar to disabled people and their relatives, but the mainstream, which is still struggling to convey difference, let alone the nuance surrounding it, has a long way to go before it catches up.

Recently I have been watching The Undateables, a TV show about disabled people who are trying to find love. I avoided it for years, mainly due to the awful name, but I caught the last 10 minutes a couple of weeks ago and found myself in tears. Not only is it sensitively made, with real affection towards its subjects, but it has that humour and tenderness that is missing elsewhere. It’s not about pity, it’s about recognition and acknowledgement. “I am here. I have needs. Look at me.”

I say all this because so often people are dismissive of arguments regarding representation, with the most visible members of society often especially dismissive. I suppose that, having been surrounded by images of people who look just like them, they have ceased to be critical – they do not realise the impact that invisibility can have. Whether you’re an overweight middle-aged woman, a black teenager, a young man with Down’s syndrome or a lesbian, not seeing yourself has a silencing effect. Why bother to speak up when no one will listen? The government is in the process of assaulting the most vulnerable people in society with brutal austerity measures, and yet those people are invisible, their voices are muted. Perhaps it makes it easier. Perhaps it salves the politicians’ consciences.

And to those who believe that representation – in fashion or otherwise – is unimportant, I say consider this: imagine you see no one who looks like you, a normal looking bloke, anywhere in the media. Instead, all the politicians, comedians, newsreaders, game-show hosts and cultural commentators look like identical Ken dolls with identical abs. And I’m not just talking about Hollywood and porn here, which are well on the way to that reality – I’m talking about current affairs and politics, spheres in which it is still just about OK to be a bit jowly, if you’re a white man. All around you see these 6ft Adonises giving their opinions, drafting legislation, being seen. In their eyes, you are invisible, yet when you walk along the street you see a different story.

How would that make you feel? Would you be OK with it or would you get angry, start a campaign?

The world is wide. It’s populated by a motley crew of weird and wonderful individuals with all kinds of flaws and all kinds of quirks. To fail to acknowledge their existence is not just a crime, it is boring.