Sinéad O’Dwyer Spring/Summer 20256 Images
Yesterday (August 7), Sinéad O’Dwyer made her Copenhagen debut, bringing with her a continued commitment to diversifying fashion week to the city’s Opera Park. As with her previous London Fashion Week shows, which sent fat and disabled people down the runway in her body-baring creations, the Irish designer worked with a range of people to build an accessible runway.
This included sending Mahalia Handley, a body dysmorphic disorder and PCOS advocate, and a blind model, Lucy Edwards, and her guide dog, Miss Molly, down the concrete runway. “This is a landmark moment because I’m not only the first blind model to walk Copenhagen Fashion Week but to consult on the first tactile runway in collaboration with the fabulous Hair and Care team,” Edwards told Dazed. “Our work won’t stop here.” Edwards was also the first blind person to have walked for a London brand.
Edwards says she’s “on a mission” with Anna Cofone, a hairstylist and founder of the non-profit Hair & Care, to overhaul the fashion and beauty industry landscape. For Cofone, this includes celebrating a new chapter in O’Dwyer’s journey by bringing a silky, fresh yet controlled gloss to runway hair, which she says “worked well on all the models.”
“When we styled Lucy’s hair, we felt the textures and shapes together, so that Lucy could imagine the look,” she says. “Beauty being accessible for all is so important to us, as is the awareness that if a person is blind, it doesn’t mean they don’t care about their appearance.” O’Dwyer’s Copenhagen show also invited ten blind and low-vision guests to experience the show, giving out swatches of the fabrics she used in the spring/summer 2025 collection and audio descriptions from her outlining her inspiration and details about the models.
Despite the push for greater diversity and inclusivity across the fashion and beauty world in recent years, major events still routinely leave out the disabled community. “There is a whole community of people who are often missing out on what the industry has to offer and how they can engage with it through their senses,” says Cofone.
After growing up with a blind parent, her father having been diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, Cofone says she’s spotted the gaps in accessibility within the industry from a young age. The lack of progress across the industry, she says, is perhaps primarily due to a lack of understanding. But with the luxury market’s larger-than-life budgets in mind, there’s simply no excuse. As O’Dwyer’s latest show has once again proven – filled with choppy micro-bangs, glossy slick-backs, and size-inclusive colourful cut-outs – runway beauty is far more interesting when everyone can get involved.
