Clothes that don’t look frumpy or messy while seated are hard to find if you are a wheelchair user, and accommodating for leg bags, pouches and cathing with limited hand function can be even more demanding. Thankfully, adapting is a skill that most of us with spinal cord injuries know well, so modifying and creating the adaptive clothing of your dreams is doable. All you need is a vision and a sewing machine — plus a willingness to learn, try, fail and ultimately, craft your garments to fit your needs.

Over 20 years as a T12-L1 paraplegic, Minna Hong has learned to embrace her creative side to make her fashion work for her. “The thing that has helped me the most lately is modifying clothes to make my life easier,” she says. “I love wearing jumpsuits and overalls. But peeing is a bitch in them.”

Her solution? Placing snaps in the crotch area for easy access. Not only has the simple modification made cathing easier, it has been a game-changer in what she wears. Another hack to make cathing easier is wearing thigh-high socks or tights. “If I wear stockings or tights with a dress, I cut out the crotch because they’re hard to take on and off,” she says.

Hong’s modifications are intended to make life easier, but the fit is important, too. “I cut the sides of a T-shirt so it won’t ride up. I also cut the front of shirts so they are short in the front and long in the back.”

Whether you’re tinkering with the fit or the function, learning to adapt your wardrobe can save you money, open up a world of possibilities and lead to dramatic improvement in your day-to-day life.

An OT Embraces Her Passion

Emily Seibert was an aspiring physical therapist when she sustained a T8 spinal cord injury just before her 17th birthday. She ultimately decided to switch to occupational therapy, in part so she could embrace her creative vision for modifying and adapting things. Clothing was one of the first areas she focused on. “After my injury, in the mid-90s, the pants were high-waisted, and I didn’t want the jeans sitting under my boobs while I was in my chair,” she says. “So, I studied them and figured out how I wanted them to fit.”

Seibert used the few sewing skills she had learned in her high school home economics class and attempted to adapt her jeans to fit properly. She learned to work the foot pedal of the sewing machine with her hand or elbow. She used a seam ripper to remove the waistband from the front and sides of the jeans. “I figured out how much fabric to trim away and sewed the waistband back on, so the button, buttonhole and zipper were where I wanted them.”

Once mid-rise jeans became fashionable, the fit was better, but she still needed the length for her 5’9” frame. She learned what to look for in off-the-rack clothes that will make them easier to modify. “I always carry a small measuring tape in my backpack to measure the inseam of pants,” she says. “I rarely try on pants in stores, but I always measure the inseam.” Checking the pant cuff is also atop her list.“ I study the hem in pants to see if I can let them out to the length I need,” she says.

When Seibert got married, she only had three months from the day her fiancé proposed until her wedding since her soon-to-be-husband was in the military. That meant little time for alterations and more need for creative thinking.

In college, she’d discovered two-piece dresses fit her well. By thinking outside the box, she was able to find a timely solution by modifying a one-piece dress from David’s Bridal. “I envisioned the dress as two pieces,” she says, “a fitted top and a less poofy skirt with more taper — if we removed the extra material.” A local seamstress helped her turn the off-the-rack purchase into the wedding dress of her dreams.

Seibert recently put her sewing skills to work again adapting some jeggings from Old Navy. “I like the 3-inch waistband in the back, but it’s too high in front, and I find it’s harder to get the pants over my hips. I cut the elastic waistband from the hips to the bottom of the waistband in front and finished off the edge,” she says. “They fit perfectly.”

A Self-Taught Seam-ster

A perfect fit is always nice, but sometimes you simply don’t want to show the public your crack. That’s what inspired Chris Murphy, a T12 para, to go to work on his shorts. Murphy, a 1996 Paralympic bronze medalist in sailing, wanted shorts that wouldn’t show his crack while playing wheelchair basketball with the Charlotte Hurricanes. He was familiar with companies that created adaptive clothing, “But I’m cheap, and those clothes were cost-prohibitive. I had a sewing machine and decided to give it a whirl.”

Outside of a trimester of sewing in home ec during high school, Murphy is completely self-taught. He learned from others on social media, watched YouTube videos and asked a friend for advice. He ended up buying enough spandex material for one pair of gym shorts at the low price of $10 per yard. He ended up with a pair of perfect-fitting shorts; today he has six.

His adapting didn’t stop there. He has developed a simple hack to keep his off-the-rack pants up during transfers. “I add a crescent-shaped piece of material — about 2 to 3 inches — starting at each hip,” he says. “It’s enough material for the back of the pants to come up high enough in a seated position.”

His knack for adaptation is earning him a reputation with wheelchair-using friends. “There’s a guy I play basketball with and he bought a pair of overalls, but when he sat in his chair, all that extra material bunched up in the front,” says Murphy. “He came over one day and I picked apart the seam. I pulled the bib all the way down, then stitched it across the front. He really likes it.”

The Jeans of Her Dreams

Heidi McKenzie had studied fashion merchandising before sustaining a T4 SCI in 2007, but after her injury, clothing was the last thing on her mind. “I wore a lot of pajama pants that were easy to get on,” she says. “In the beginning, I didn’t care to look good, because I wasn’t going anywhere.” Her mindset changed when she met 26 other women with disabilities at the Ms. Wheelchair America pageant. “That was when I said to myself, ‘OK, I want to get back into fashion.’”

She returned to college to finish her fashion merchandising program but ended up graduating with a business degree. That led her to an online program to learn how to develop an adapted clothing line. She chose to focus on jeans because they were something she enjoyed before her accident and struggled with after. “I had a difficult time finding jeans that would cover my crack and fit comfortably on my stomach,” she says. “The length and the pockets were never right [with] off-the-rack jeans. So, I constructed a pair of jeans to fix all those things.”

McKenzie sketched a pair of jeans to include a higher waist in the back, a longer inseam, an opening for catheterizing for women and easily accessible pockets. A freelance designer in North Carolina assisted her in constructing the first prototype.

The process took three years, but in 2015, Alter Ur Ego was born. While the business continues to sell its jeans, it’s hard to sustain an adaptive fashion line because the product isn’t mass-produced. The jeans need to be priced high just for her to break even.

McKenzie sums up what she’s discovered about fashion and clothing as a woman with a spinal cord injury. “I know it’s a cliché, but when you look good, you feel good. Find an article of clothing that makes you feel good, and base your whole style around it.”