Bri Scalesse

Bri Scalesse models for major brands while documenting the inaccessible production spaces those same brands put her in, using her platform to create public accountability that formal airline and industry complaint processes have not produced.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Use Assistive Technologies
• Navigator-side Compensations → Stage a Protest
• Navigator-side Compensations → Assert One's Rights

What it is

Bri Scalesse is a wheelchair-using model and disability advocate who has worked in campaigns for Nike, UGG, Skims, Tommy Hilfiger, NARS, Sephora, Adidas, Rimmel London, Google, and others since 2019.¹² She walked the runway at New York Bridal Fashion Week and appeared in the Project Runway finale.³ She completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at Columbia University.⁴

Her wheelchair is essential to her livelihood as a model. She named it Aphrodite -- Aph for short -- as a declaration that it is part of her body, not a separate tool.⁵ When a Delta flight damaged her chair on July 4, 2021, she posted to TikTok: "Today my freedom, my independence was taken away." The video received nearly 500,000 likes.⁶ Delta offered cab fare, then agreed to cover repair and rental costs. The incident was not unusual: U.S. airlines lose or damage approximately 29 wheelchairs per day.⁷

The ENABLE Model observes Scalesse at three navigator-side locations. Her wheelchair is the assistive technology without which she cannot work; damage to it is damage to her employment. She stages public campaigns by documenting inaccessible conditions in real time on public platforms, producing accountability through social pressure that institutional complaint processes have not. She asserts rights by pushing for federal legislation -- the Air Carrier Access Amendments Act -- that would have required improved wheelchair storage and higher penalties for carriers.⁶

Why it matters

The fashion industry's accessibility failures are structurally invisible unless someone makes them visible. That documentation labor falls on the disabled person hired to represent inclusion.

The space Scalesse works in barely existed before she entered it. The first wheelchair user walked the New York Fashion Week runway in 2014 as a "role model," not in a commercial brand campaign.⁸ Jillian Mercado appeared in a Diesel campaign that same year. Aaron Rose Philip became the first wheelchair user on a luxury runway at Moschino in 2021.⁹ Scalesse started modeling in 2019, five years into a window that had opened only because disabled people pushed it open. The fashion industry's design infrastructure -- its venues, backstages, runways, and fitting processes -- was built across a century in which wheelchair users were not expected to be there. The inaccessible dressing room at the bottom of the stairs is the building expressing its assumptions.

When brands hire wheelchair-using models for campaigns, they produce a representation signal -- this brand includes disabled people. That signal does not transfer to the production infrastructure. Scalesse arrived at early modeling jobs to find the dressing room located down a flight of stairs with no way to descend safely, physically separated from non-disabled models.⁵ The brand hired her to represent inclusion. The venue's physical design excluded her. She absorbed both conditions simultaneously: modeling while navigating inaccessibility, and speaking publicly about it so the contradiction would be on record. That double labor -- doing the represented work and producing the record of what makes it harder than it should be -- is the navigator-side pattern the ENABLE Model names.

The airline wheelchair damage story turns on enforcement architecture as much as carrier behavior. The Air Carrier Access Act was passed in 1986. Unlike the ADA, it has no private right of action -- meaning disabled passengers cannot sue airlines directly in federal court.¹⁰ The 2001 Supreme Court decision in Alexander v. Sandoval foreclosed the implied right that some courts had previously recognized.¹⁰ The only formal recourse is a complaint to the DOT, whose enforcement capacity is limited. Airlines have operated under this structure for decades, damaging approximately 29 wheelchairs per day across U.S. carriers with minimal legal exposure.⁷ The ACAA's enforcement weakness reflects the political economy of aviation regulation. When Scalesse's chair was damaged, the institutional response was cab fare. The public response to her TikTok video -- nearly 500,000 likes, national media coverage, direct pressure on Delta -- produced a repair commitment within days.⁶ Navigator-side protest via social media moved faster than the regulatory infrastructure built to handle the same failure, because the regulatory infrastructure was built without the legal teeth that would have made it work.

That infrastructure did eventually move. In December 2024, the DOT issued a final rule establishing a rebuttable presumption of violation whenever a wheelchair is returned damaged after airline custody -- requiring carriers to notify passengers of their rights, provide loaner chairs, and allow passengers to choose their own repair vendor.¹¹ The rule arrived three years after Scalesse's incident and many thousands of damaged chairs later. The gap between the incident, the viral documentation, the advocacy, and the regulatory response is a measure of how much navigator-side labor the system requires before it responds.

The rule does not address the bodily harm. An ill-fitting wheelchair is a medical risk. Wheelchair fit determines pressure distribution across body weight; an incorrectly sized chair raises the risk of pressure injuries that can develop within hours, progress to deep tissue damage, and in severe cases lead to systemic infection and sepsis.¹² A custom chair is fitted to a specific person's weight, posture, and movement patterns. A loaner is not. Scalesse spent six weeks adjusting to a temporary replacement after her incident -- six weeks of elevated physical risk, in a job whose requirements depend on the specific handling characteristics of her chair.⁶ The harm that accumulates in that interval is not recovered by a repair reimbursement. It is harm built into the structure of how airlines handle mobility devices, falling on disabled people's bodies every day at a rate of approximately 29 chairs.

Anthropologie brought Scalesse and six other disabled people into builder-side qa-testing for its first adaptive collection before launch, evaluating each garment for wearability and ease of use.¹³ Feedback produced modifications to pants and denim before the collection shipped. Requirement-setting and design are earlier stages where disabled people can also be involved.

Scalesse has named the asymmetry directly: "I don't think it should be on the model to have to fight so hard to exist somewhere in the same space as other models."⁵ That sentence identifies an accessibility ultimatum: do the work of making the space accessible, or don't work in it. The brand gets the representation. The model carries the labor.

Real-world examples

In the news

Model Bri Scalesse speaks out after she says wheelchair damaged during flight (July 2021)
-- Ronnie Koenig, TODAY

• Scalesse's Delta incident drew nearly 500,000 TikTok likes and national coverage. Delta's initial offer was cab fare; the public response produced a repair commitment. TODAY reported the incident alongside the broader data: U.S. airlines lose or damage approximately 29 wheelchairs daily. The incident shows navigator-side/protest outperforming institutional complaint infrastructure -- public social documentation moved the carrier faster than formal process.

In the news

Bri Scalesse Wants To See More Disabled Models
-- Natalie Michie, FASHION Magazine

• FASHION documented Scalesse's experience at modeling jobs where the dressing room was located down a flight of stairs, inaccessible to her chair, with disabled models physically separated from non-disabled peers. This is builder-side design failure: production infrastructure built without wheelchair users as participants. The brand's representation signal and the venue's physical design ran in opposite directions. The model absorbed both.

In the news

Secretary Buttigieg Announces Sweeping Protections for Airline Passengers with Disabilities (December 2024)
-- U.S. Department of Transportation

• The DOT's December 2024 final rule established that returning a damaged wheelchair creates a rebuttable presumption of violation under the Air Carrier Access Act, required airlines to notify passengers of repair rights, and mandated loaner chairs. The rule arrived three years after the wave of public wheelchair damage incidents -- including Scalesse's -- that generated the advocacy pushing for it. Assert-rights activity at the individual level, aggregated across many disabled travelers over years, eventually moved regulation that individual complaints had not.

In the news

Anthropologie taps influencers and the wider disability community to launch its first adaptive collection
-- Sara Spruch-Feiner, Glossy

• Anthropologie's chief creative director confirmed that seven disabled people, including Scalesse, fit-tested each garment before the collection launched, evaluating wearability and ease of dressing. This is builder-side qa-testing that reached disabled users before launch rather than after complaints -- the structural contrast to the dressing room at the bottom of the stairs.

• The Air Carrier Access Amendments Act was introduced in Congress in September 2021, co-sponsored by Senators Baldwin, Duckworth, Casey, Blumenthal, Markey, Merkley, and Hassan. It would have required improved wheelchair stowage and higher penalties for damage. Scalesse publicly urged her followers to support the bill.⁶ It did not pass.
• The 2024 DOT final rule implementing rebuttable presumption of violation for wheelchair damage represented partial regulatory movement -- not the legislation Scalesse and others had advocated for, but movement in the same direction.¹¹
• She fit-tested garments for Anthropologie's adaptive collection at the brand's Philadelphia headquarters before launch, alongside three other disabled influencers and three additional community members.¹³

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the design, qa-testing, and content stages involves building physical and procedural infrastructure that wheelchair-using models and travelers can actually use:

• "We checked the dressing room, the runway approach, and the backstage space for wheelchair access before booking the venue."
• "We fit-tested every garment with disabled users before the collection launched, not after."
• "Accessibility is the standard, not an exception."
• "We cast a wheelchair user in this campaign and made sure the shoot location was accessible before the day."
• "When I'm on the runway, I feel really powerful. I feel present in my body." -- Bri Scalesse, describing what access makes possible⁵

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect at the design stage involves hiring disabled models for representation while building production infrastructure for non-disabled participants:

• "The dressing room is down a flight of stairs. Can she manage?" *1
• "We'd love to have her but the venue isn't fully accessible." *2
• "The wheelchair will travel with checked baggage." *3

*1: Inaccessible dressing rooms are default conditions in fashion production spaces built without wheelchair users in mind.⁵
*2: Venue inaccessibility is builder-side failure at requirement-setting -- accessibility was not a requirement when the space was selected.
*3: Airlines damage or lose approximately 29 wheelchairs per day. A power wheelchair is a mobility prosthetic. Returning it damaged disables the person whose movement it provides.⁷

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor wheelchair-using models and travelers carry when fashion and carrier infrastructure fails to build access in:

• "Today my freedom, my independence was taken away." -- Bri Scalesse, TikTok, after her wheelchair was damaged by Delta⁶
• "I felt like I just didn't have a place, quite literally." -- Bri Scalesse, on arriving at an inaccessible modeling job⁵
• "I don't think it should be on the model to have to fight so hard to exist somewhere in the same space as other models." -- Bri Scalesse⁵
• "My wheelchair is my freedom. My wheelchair is my partner in movement." -- Bri Scalesse, on why damage to the chair is damage to the person⁶
• "I didn't see anybody in a wheelchair on TV, in movies, and definitely not in fashion." -- Bri Scalesse, on the absence she grew up with and that her work now partially fills³

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All observations occur within the context of fashion modeling and commercial air travel in the United States, where disabled models are hired for representation campaigns by brands whose production infrastructure excludes them, and where the labor of documenting and advocating against those exclusions falls on the disabled people inside the industry.

Footnotes

1. We Speak Model Management: Bri Scalesse ↩

2. Grazia: Bri Scalesse Is Advocating For Disabilities and Changing Perceptions ↩

3. Grazia: Bri Scalesse Is Advocating For Disabilities and Changing Perceptions ↩ ↩²

4. Columbia School of the Arts: Writers in Collaboration -- A Model Writer ↩

5. FASHION Magazine: Bri Scalesse Wants To See More Disabled Models ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

6. TODAY: Model Bri Scalesse speaks out after she says wheelchair damaged during flight ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

7. Matador Network: It's Time for Airlines to Change How They Treat Wheelchair Users ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. ABC News: First Model in Wheelchair at New York Fashion Week Has Message for Fashion Industry (2014) ↩

9. WWD: Aaron Rose Philip Longs to Tear Down Barriers for Models With Disabilities ↩

10. University of Maryland Law: The Air Carrier Access Act: It is Time for an Overhaul ↩ ↩²

11. U.S. Department of Transportation: Secretary Buttigieg Announces Sweeping Protections for Airline Passengers with Disabilities ↩ ↩²

12. WoundSource: Current State of Knowledge on Wheelchairs and Pressure Injuries ↩

13. Glossy: Anthropologie taps influencers and the wider disability community to launch its first adaptive collection ↩ ↩²