LONDON: Smashing the fashion world’s rigid conventions, UK modelling agency Zebedee has been filling catwalks with a diverse array of models for seven years.

On the catwalks at London Fashion Week, which started on Friday, it is now common to see models from all ethnic backgrounds, with minorities now making up around half of shows, compared to 14 per cent just 10 years ago, according to a report published in January.

Zebedee also works to find greater exposure for models with visible disabilities or who are transgender. “It’s still incredibly rare to see anybody with a disability feature. London, Paris, Milan, New York, it’s still very, very rare,” Zebedee’s co-founder Laura Winson said.

A former social worker who often worked with disabled people, Winson founded the agency in 2017 with her sister-in-law Zoe Proctor, a former model.

“We launched it because we felt that there was a lack of representation and fashion and media,” she explained. Zebedee works like any other agency, except that all of its models have a “visible difference”. Some are in wheelchairs, have atrophy of limbs or albinism, while others have Down syndrome.

Around 15pc of the world’s population, or one billion people, live with some form of disability, according to UN figures.

“Yet figures show that maybe around one percent of people featured in advertising have a disability”, with catwalk repre­se­ntation even worse, pointed out Winson.

Two Zebedee models will tread the catwalk at London Fashion Week: Vic, a young woman in a wheelchair who will show for Gasanova, and Oscar, a transgender model with autism, who will display for Helen Kirkum.

Published in Dawn, February 18th, 2024