GLAMOUR’s third annual Self-Love issue is here, starring three innovators who have forged new paths for women in creative industries. Each cover star is a game-changer in their field, a shining example of the power of representation, and an advocate for celebrating joy within the Disabled community. It wasn’t until the ’70s that any type of major legislation in the world began to include Disability rights as a civil rights issue. Buildings were made without ramps and lifts, job discrimination didn’t allow us to participate equally in society, and even schools didn’t allow people with Disabilities to attend classes among non-Disabled peers. In a world not made with us in mind, the journey of finding self-love can be a challenge when it feels like the definition left your community out entirely.
For 22-year-old fashion communication student Ellie Darby-Prangnell, self-love has been a constantly evolving journey. Ellie says, “The world defines it as body positivity and self-care. It's definitely something that is always evolving. It has been such a journey for me.”
“Medical professionals would forget that you are a person. Or, in my case, a teenage girl.”
Ellie has been in a wheelchair her entire life. Often wrapped up in the fact that she needed to love her body to experience self-love, her path to finding it has not been linear. She didn’t see people who looked like her in the media growing up much at all. The first time Ellie saw representation when she was younger was in a cartoon where one character was in a wheelchair. Outside of that, she says it was pretty non-existent throughout her childhood.
Growing up, Ellie attended countless doctor appointments with medical professionals who would emotionlessly use words like “deformed” in reference to her body. This made finding body positivity difficult, something many teenage girls struggle with.
“I think one thing I’ve noticed is that we all grow up with insecurities. To be honest, a lot of it came from medical professionals,” she says. “They would almost have no filter, and they forget that you are a person. Or in my case, I was a teenage girl. So, I would go in for appointments for my spine, and they would be like, ‘Oh, she’s quite deformed.’ They would comment about my ribs, saying, ‘Your ribs really protrude.’ It’s just like, ‘Shut up!’ I want to scream because everything I am insecure about you are literally confirming to me.”
Apart from medical professionals, Ellie found it difficult to escape the assumptions of her non-Disabled peers growing up. The constant assumption that Disability is something one must overcome made it hard for her to appreciate that element of her identity. It wasn’t an uncommon experience for people to come up to Ellie and ask her, “What is wrong with you?” – a common experience for those living with visible Disabilities.
“People make you think that if you’ve got a job or if you’re thriving in life, you’ve overcome your Disability, which is so not true,” Ellie tells GLAMOUR. When you’re born with a Disability, you don’t have any other life to compare it to, so you basically have to learn how to adapt from birth. Never do you overcome your Disability; you simply learn to live with it. Alongside it.
“It’s incredibly hard growing up when people constantly feed that narrative to you that there is something wrong with you and you need to overcome it, but you don’t,” she says.
“When I’m in a powerful outfit, girl, I literally feel so much more powerful than when I’m not.”
People with Disabilities make up about 15% of the world’s population, according to the World Health Organization, making it the world’s largest minority. That number is steadily on the rise amid a global pandemic and ageing populations. According to Glaad, around 2.8 of recurring TV show characters have a Disability, which makes them the least-represented minority group [NB: still correct with new figures. Per person, trans men have less representation – 14/775, trans women 20/775 and non-binary 8/775, versus 22/775 for characters with Disabilities. Still, the group as a whole has more representation than those with disabilities] on television, according to the World Institute on Disability.
Frequently, actors portraying Disabled characters are not themselves Disabled, which makes the representation often inauthentic to the Disabled experience. This creates stereotypes and can actually be more harmful than beneficial to the Disabled community.
It wasn’t until the last decade that the media began to include genuine representations of people with Disabilities. Ellie first began seeing this representation in the fashion industry when she was 14 years old. Model Jillian Mercado was featured in a Diesel campaign in 2014, and the following year, Ellie had the privilege of getting to work at Diesel’s headquarters. She said working there ignited a burning desire in her soul to create a world where fashion and Disability intersect.
“They were just so lovely. It felt right, like, ‘This is the industry for me,’” says Ellie. “I knew it was tricky to get into, but I had always had a vision in my mind that I wanted to create my own section in the industry. I wanted to create my own little world in it, and doing fashion communication has been a way for me to get out what’s in my brain and put it into photoshoots and articles and tell our stories to the world."
Fashion is everything to Ellie. “It’s a way to communicate how I feel to the world. And it’s kind of just… even though it’s a personal thing; it’s also become my life,” Ellie says. “I think when you have so little control over your body, and what it does, what it looks like, fashion is a way to kind of take back your power. And it’s a way to communicate how I feel to the world.”
Fashion has helped Ellie develop a sense of self-love. She says, “When I’m in a powerful outfit, girl, I literally feel so much more powerful than when I’m not.”
At the time of Ellie’s internship with Diesel, she was 15, and the staff told her they got a lot of backlash for their campaign featuring Jillian Mercado. At the time, nobody had seen a Disabled person in a campaign before. The public perception was that Jillian was being exploited for her Disability. Ellie recalls a conversation with staff at Diesel where she said, “They were like, ‘No, we’re just doing this because Disabled people deserve to be in fashion campaigns and to be seen. And when I heard them say that, I was like, ‘Yeah, we need to do more; this isn’t enough.’”
During her days at Diesel, Ellie would daydream about making the fashion industry accessible beyond a single campaign. She dreamed of shoots where Disability was at all angles, both in front of and behind the camera. “So yes, Look Deeper is what that vision was when I was 15, and I just never let it go, and it took me a while to figure out what I wanted the medium to be.
"Originally, I thought it was a clothing brand. And then as I’ve grown into my own career as a fashion communicator, I learned about zines and their history with marginalised communities and underground press and sharing stories that mainstream media just ignore. So, I brought out the first issue actually because we had a university project to make a zine about body in the media, –that was all we had to do – and I was like, I am going to town on this project. So, I did photoshoots. I got into contact with so many people in the community and honestly it changed my life. That project truly changed my life, because I was like, ‘This is everything I love doing and I’m able to engage with my people and share their stories because we have all been ignored for so long.’”
As the mother of Look Deeper, it was important to Ellie that every creative involved also be Disabled. Every model, photographer, makeup artist, graphic designer, and creative all had some type of Disability.
“Some people failed to look any deeper into my personhood. They just saw a girl in a wheelchair existing in a club as radical. It’s like, ‘Girl, I’m literally an 18-year-old girl trying to get drunk with my friends; leave me alone.’”
Negative experiences in the industry also drove her passion for this project. After being asked to do photoshoots as a model in the past, Ellie was discouraged when telling a brand about her access needs left her ghosted by campaigns that claimed to be inclusive. “I’ve been asked to do photoshoots in the past and when I told them my access needs as a model, that I need to lay down to dress, radio silence. You would then get nothing back and I just thought, ‘Absolutely not’. This is not happening any more. I was just like, ‘I can’t keep letting, number one myself, or other people, feel like they are too much to cater for. Absolutely not,” says Ellie.
She named the zine Look Deeper, a name that has evolved in meaning over time. “I always worried people would perceive it as looking past Disability, like looking deeper, and it is not meant in that way at all,” Ellie says.
She first started using that name after going out drinking with friends in college. “I would go out and would get bombarded with questions by the ableds, commenting on my very existence. They failed to look any deeper into my personhood. They just saw a girl in a wheelchair existing in a club as radical. And it’s like, ‘Girl, I’m literally an 18-year-old girl trying to get drunk with my friends, leave me alone.’ And it would be constant and they would come up to my friends, and congratulate them for being decent humans and taking me out. So, the name really came from frustration of people failing to see any kind of person,” she says.
“It has also taken on the meaning of looking deeper into issues that affect our community because the ableds see Disability as so surface level. So, they think it’s our conditions that are the problem when actually it’s inaccessibility – air travel is horrendous, forced poverty, marriage inequality. It’s going deeper into so many issues and nuanced experiences that affect our lives,” says Ellie.
After feeling like an inconvenience, it was really important to Ellie that every shoot met the access needs of every person involved. “So, when I started Look Deeper properly, it was for the second issue: we did photoshoots and always asked about people’s access needs. It made me realise it’s not hard. If someone needs to lay down to get changed, ‘Girl, get someone with a sofa, get a changing bench.’ I’m doing this on, like, no budget, and you can do it. And it just shows how little the big industries care. They could put the work in, and they don’t,” says Ellie.
Ellie feels that although growing up with a Disability made her struggle as a kid to find self-love, it has only enhanced it since she found her community in her late teens and early adulthood. “I think when I found my community, that literally changed everything for me. I’ve never loved myself more than when I’m surrounded by other Disabled people,” she says.
Seeing Jillian being featured in a fashion campaign truly set off waves of change for the fashion industry, according to Ellie. “Honestly, it was fashion that I started to, in recent years, see us represented, and I was like, ‘They’re finally doing it right.’ And that changed everything. There's still got a long way to go, don’t get me wrong, but I think just the media in general, has historically done a bad job of representing us. It’s very much time for us to do it ourselves for that reason,” she says.
Watching Crip Camp, a 2020 documentary about the Disability rights movement through the eyes of leaders like Judith Heumann, the US Disability rights activist, was monumental in Ellie’s self-love journey. “When I watched Crip Camp and engaged more with the Disabled community, I felt so proud. That made me able to love myself a hell of a lot more than ever before,” she says. “Judy’s words and wisdom and her fight have influenced me so much.”
“We are all the next wave of Disability activism.”
“I’d always been content, and I’d never wish to not be Disabled, but it made me feel like I didn’t need to shrink my Disabled identity to appear less Disabled – even though that’s physically impossible. I used to feel very embarrassed even to exist publicly because you get people making stupid comments, and I would get stared at,” Ellie says. “But when I would see people like Judy in Crip Camp – and all the others icons – I was just like, it sounds cringe, but it’s like we’re all connected, and we are all as one. Even though you might not know this person, it’s like we’re connected. I don’t need to shrink any part of myself because they don’t. So why the hell should I do that?”
“I feel like we are all the next wave of Disability activism. There was the wave in the UK – it was in the ’90s. Then in the US, it was in the ’70s, and I feel like we’re the next wave. A lot of it is online, which is great because it’s more accessible,” says Ellie.
The latest issue of Look Deeper was recently published and titled Once Upon A Hot Crip Summer. Ellie says, “The name was actually ironic because so many things happened over the summer of 2022, like the repealing of Roe v Wade in America and how that impacts our community in the UK. There were government issues, and an NHS crisis. We just wanted a space to put all of that, no matter how our summer was, whether it was good or terrible, I wanted us to have a space to put that. Just a little nugget of Disability culture that we can keep for years to come,” she says with pride. “And also, not that Look Deeper is for the ableds, but I think if they do read it, it’s an authentic and honest representation of our lives.”
You can order your copy of Look Deeper here.
Journalist: Madison Lawson
Photographer: Aitken Jolly
Stylist: Michelle Duguid
Hair: Lauraine Bailey
Makeup: Sarah Jagger
Manicure: Danni O'Mahoney
Beauty Director: Camilla Kay
Design Director: Dennis Lye
Entertainment Director: Emily Maddick
Production: Dalia Nassimi
Creative Video Producer: Chrissie Moncrieffe
Purpose Editor: Lucy Morgan
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