Crip fashion networks: Dress exchanges, hacks and affirmations in disability communities

This article explores how Disabled people develop social, relational and material structures, a framework I call crip fashion networks, to access clothing and cultivate fashion communities in response to their exclusion from the dominant fashion industry. Drawing on five representative narratives from wardrobe interviews with Disabled men and masculine people, I theorize crip fashion networks as systems where Disabled people collectively build alternative fashion worlds outside of mainstream industry structures. Within these networks, I identify three crip strategies that sustain and animate them: crip exchanges, where Disabled people swap and share clothing; crip hacks, where Disabled people exchange styling and dressing techniques that support their bodyminds; and crip confidence, where Disabled people affirm their fashioned identities through encounters and relationships. By mapping crip fashion networks, I extend past research in fashion studies that has primarily framed the relationship between fashion and disability through the lenses of industry or commodity. Instead, I conceptualize this relationship as a network generated through Disabled people’s everyday acts of creativity and collective care, acts that cultivate disability worlds rather than drive the growth of a capitalist industry.