Output details

Cinderella, you can go to the ball: inclusive footwear design at the intersection of medicine and fashion.

By 2020, half the adults in UK will be aged 50 or over, while the number of 65-84 year-olds across the globe is predicted to rise from 400 million to 1.3 billion by 2050. Foot damage is a major cause of limitation to mobility and wellbeing in later life, and one of the ways older people become excluded because footwear doesn’t match physical and social needs.

In UK, the 2000 Audit Commission review of NHS therapeutic footwear identified expenditure by clinicians on prescription footwear of £20 million per year. Studies have indicated that at least one in 6 pairs are not worn, and approximately £3½ million is wasted annually. Unlike any other medical intervention, prescription shoes replace personally and socially communicative, fashion adornment worn as an aspect of an individual's identity, thus they may be experienced as a marker of disease and invade peoples’ lives, interfering with their identity. This research output combines the findings of projects undertaken in the contexts of fashion design (UCLan) and podiatry (University of Salford) to look at how to challenge the disconnection.

This peer-reviewed, co-authored paper disseminates to an international design audience via the auspices of the RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Centre, the world-leading organisation for inclusive design. It outlines the potential for re-orientation in the ‘patient’/health practitioner and ‘user’/design practitioner relationships, as studies revealed that in both fashion and health contexts, footwear is viewed differently by clinical practitioners, footwear designers, and the women who wear it. The authors articulate how the personal, social and functional complexity of footwear brings a unique opportunity for research at the intersections of culture and science, fashion and medicine, where mutually limiting attitudes and practices can be identified. The need for more inclusive, collaborative approaches to the design and provision of therapeutic and mainstream footwear is emphasised.