‘By Destiny Pinto’: Disability Wellness and Fashionable Assistive Tech for All
London-based designer Destiny Pinto creates fashion-forward pieces for disabled people to accessorize their assistive devices. She started her own fashion brand By Destiny Pinto by first reflecting on her own experience as a disabled person. Due to her rheumatoid arthritis, Pinto needs to use a compression glove daily to help her navigate the disease. This experience has led to her questioning why her compression glove couldn’t look as good as anything else that she has on.
Since then, she’s designed fashionable everything from an ostomy bag pouch to a prosthetic leg with the hopes of giving those with assistive devices more confidence and access to a full life, reflecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Reduced Inequalities and Good Health and Well-Being.
Assistive technology exists in many different shapes and forms, custom-made to cater for people’s specific disabilities. This includes everything from a common pair of glasses, to hearing aids and even Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices. To disabled people, assistive technology devices are crucial parts of their lives, nearly inseparable from their bodies. Many people tend to gravitate towards accessorizing daily. By Destiny Pinto aims to make this style choice useful by making assistive technologies into accessories.
For the people who need it and for those in the fashion industry, treating assistive technology as wearable art is hardly a new concept. This can easily be seen in how glasses come in many different frame options, catering to different tastes and styles.
Over the years, more commercial assistive technologies have caught on by providing an array of design and colour variations for users. However, these designs tend to be geared towards children, using bright pastel colours and popular cartoon characters on their surfaces.
On the other hand, high fashion efforts to accessorize assistive devices have mostly been focused on creating and designing prosthetic limbs.
This has previously been seen in YVMIN’s collaboration with influencer Xiao Yang and again in the ongoing brand, The Alternative Limb Project. Both instances treat prosthetics as both a piece of assistive tech and a trendy accessory.
These instances are also why Pinto’s designs stand out. She’s able to make non-prosthetic assistive technology high-fashion too, showing that there is a demand and a need for it.
Her latest pieces are a set of matching red leather sleeves. An ostomy bag sleeve for her best friend and a compression glove sleeve for herself. In the future, Pinto aspires to create more pioneering inclusive design solutions that are catered for individuals with specific disabilities.
Designing these pieces means that she also has to take into account the different functions of different assistive devices to ensure that her accessorizing them will not get in the way of their core assistive functions.
By working on By Destiny Pinto, Pinto also wishes to advocate for more accessibility and exposure for disabled creatives like herself within the industry. A move that hopefully will create an inclusive fashion and creative industry future for all.
You can find out more about Destiny Pinto’s pieces by checking their Instagram on @destinypinto or checking their brand, By Destiny Pinto on @bydestinypinto.