Hello everyone,
I hope you’re all well.
Today’s post is another post for Elin My Blurred World and I’s seeing through sight loss series. If you don’t know about our series then you can find out more about it here.
Today’s post is all about fashion, we’re going to tell you how we make fashion accessible for us as blind and visually impaired girls. Sighted people often have perceived ideas that blind and visually impaired people can’t be fashionable or look stylish, however this is wrong and we are going to tackle these ideas in our posts on fashion and sight loss.
This post is split into different categories so it gives you more of an insight into everything about fashion and sight loss.
Let’s get into it!
Shopping
There are many ways in which blind or visually impaired people can shop for clothes, makeup, jewellery, and all the daily essentials. The first is to go shopping with a sighted person. This can be a nice day out if you want, for example going with a friend or a family member and having a good catch up at the same time. That way, you don’t feel like you’re dragging them along just for you to do some shopping.
The second is to get sighted assistance in a store from a member of staff. The way in which this works is you tell the member of staff what you need and then they will help you find the specific items, describe them to you and tell you about any available offers on the products that you want.
The third way in which blind and visually impaired people can shop is to do online shopping and buy from a range of different websites depending on what you want to buy. Personally, I don’t always find online shopping that accessible as the pictures of clothes for example, don’t always have photo descriptions so it’s hard for me to know what they’re like. Websites aren’t always accessible with a screen-reader either so this can make things extremely difficult.
Personally I prefer going shopping with a sighted person as I know that they’ll help me choose things that I’ll definitely love!
Organising
Many people are amazed at how blind and visually impaired people organise their clothes and accessories. Everyone is different but personally I think being more organised is best and really makes things easier.
The way in which I organise my clothes is in wardrobes and cupboards/drawers. For example, I have all of my “smart” and “going out” clothes in one side of my wardrobe and all my “casual” clothes in the other side. I then have t-shirts and things like that in cupboards and drawers. This way works well for me as I know where everything is and things aren’t cluttered. I hate clutter!
For blind and visually impaired people, it’s often about the sense of touch. It’s also about memorising what goes with what. For example, which tops go with skirts, jeans, trousers etc. When it comes down to dresses though, as you can guess, they are rather easy. As a blind person myself, choosing an outfit is all about the sense of touch and memory because I cannot see my outfits. I’ll memorise the feel of something and then remember what it goes with. I do sometimes also use apps on my phone such as Tap Tap See to find out the colour of an item of clothing.
One other useful tip is to label items of clothing, I know many blind and visually impaired people that do this. One way to do this is using the RNIB Penfriend, stick a label on an item of clothing for example, place the penfriend device on the label and record what it is and whenever you scan the device on the particular label it will read your recording out loud.
Jewellery
Jewellery is such as important part of fashion, for me anyway! I’ve got the jewellery that I wear every day but the way in which I organise the rest of it is probably like sighted people, in jewellery boxes and little stands. To pick out my jewellery I do it using the sense of touch and memory, I find that it all comes naturally to me and I don’t think about it when I’m doing so.
There’s this idea around fashion and style that blind people can’t be “stylish” but why not? There’s ways and means around things such as getting new outfits, organising clothes and picking out an outfit. Just because a person is blind or visually impaired, it doesn’t mean that they can’t keep up with the latest trends or be stylish.
I hope you enjoyed this post and got a bit of an insight into the way and fashion and sight loss works.
Make sure you check out Elin’s post as I know it’ll be amazing as always! Please keep an eye out for future posts in our series and if you have any post suggestions for us then feel free to contact us!
If you enjoyed this post and would like me to do more fashion related posts then let me know!
Holly x
Life of a Blind Girl 