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, which would have required improved wheelchair storage and higher penalties for carriers.⁶

Why it matters

Designers, venue operators, and production companies built the American fashion industry's physical infrastructure for standing participants across the 20th century, making design decisions about runway dimensions, dressing room locations, backstage corridor widths, and casting studio layouts that treated wheelchair access as a non-requirement. Wheelchair users were not in those spaces as workers or as designers during that period, concentrated instead in the hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and institutional facilities that expanded alongside 19th-century industrialization. When Helen Lee Cookman, a designer with hearing loss, spent three years at NYU's Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation starting in 1955, she documented the absence by building a 17-item collection for disabled bodies and enlisting nearly 30 American designers in the Functional Fashions program, the largest collaborative clothing effort for disabled people in U.S. history.⁸ The program, run through the Clothing Research and Development Foundation that Cookman established with New York Times style editor Virginia Pope, ended when Cookman and Pope died in the 1970s. Mainstream fashion production spaces did not change. The first wheelchair user walked the New York Fashion Week runway in 2014; Aaron Rose Philip became the first wheelchair user on a luxury runway at Moschino in 2021.⁹¹⁰ Scalesse entered the industry in 2019, in the middle of that narrow window, reaching dressing rooms located down flights of stairs in venues that had been booked and confirmed without her movement requirements as a constraint.

Brands that hire wheelchair-using models do not automatically restructure the production spaces those models work in. Casting decisions and venue decisions travel through different teams in fashion production: one team selects models, another books venues, a third builds out the set. At each stage, the default is a standing participant. The Zebedee Talent agency, which represents disabled models in the UK, lists the questions that must be confirmed before any booking: whether wheelchair access exists, whether changing rooms are large enough, whether communication support is present.¹¹ These questions persist because venues selected under non-disability production norms routinely produce no as the default answer. Philippa Nesbitt calls the result a "paradox of visibility": disabled models appear in fashion media while production practice segregates them into adaptive campaigns that mark disability as something outside mainstream fashion's ordinary scope.¹² Scalesse experienced this directly, arriving at early jobs to find the dressing room located down a flight of stairs, inaccessible to her chair, physically separating her from non-disabled models.⁵ The brand that hired her to represent inclusion and the venue that held the shoot answered to different accountability structures, and the person who absorbed the gap between them was Scalesse.

Congress built the Air Carrier Access Act in 1986 without a private right of action, leaving the DOT as the sole enforcement mechanism and disabled passengers without recourse in federal court.¹³ The 2001 Supreme Court decision in Alexander v. Sandoval foreclosed the implied right that some courts had previously recognized.¹³ The only formal recourse is a complaint to the DOT, whose enforcement capacity is limited. Airlines operated under this structure for decades, damaging approximately 29 wheelchairs per day across U.S. carriers with minimal legal exposure.⁷ When Scalesse's chair was damaged, Delta's institutional response was cab fare. The public response to her TikTok video, nearly 500,000 likes and national media coverage, produced a repair commitment within days.⁶ Navigator-side protest via social media moved the carrier faster than the regulatory infrastructure built to handle the same failure, because the regulatory infrastructure carried no legal teeth that would have compelled a different response.

The DOT issued a final rule in December 2024 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.¹⁴ The rule arrived three years after Scalesse's incident. Three years and many thousands of damaged chairs separated that incident from the regulatory response, measuring in concrete terms how much navigator-side advocacy labor the system required before it shifted.

Mia Mingus named the condition Scalesse lacks at inaccessible modeling jobs in 2011 as the absence of access intimacy, "that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else 'gets' your access needs" without requiring the disabled person to explain, argue, or compensate.¹⁵ Scalesse arrived at productions where the venue had not anticipated her presence and where she bore the labor of her own navigation alone. Mingus argues that access cannot become collective responsibility through goodwill alone; it requires building access infrastructure into the space before the disabled person arrives. Scalesse's public documentation practice is a form of give-feedback and protest that names the gap between representation and access in real time, to audiences that institutional complaint processes had not reached. Tobin Siebers, in "Disability Aesthetics" (2010), traces the deeper frame: fashion's aesthetic conventions evolved within a broader cultural arrangement that positioned the non-disabled body as the aesthetic standard, making the disabled body available as a visual sign of inclusion without requiring the physical space to change.¹⁶ Scalesse named the asymmetry this arrangement produces: "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: take on the labor of fighting for access in the space, or leave it.

Pressure injuries from an ill-fitting wheelchair can develop within hours, progress to deep tissue damage, and in severe cases lead to systemic infection and sepsis.¹⁷ Wheelchair fit determines pressure distribution across body weight; a custom chair is calibrated to a specific person's weight, posture, and movement patterns, and a loaner chair is not. Scalesse spent six weeks adjusting to a temporary replacement after her incident, six weeks of elevated physical risk in a job whose performance requirements depend on the specific handling characteristics of her chair.⁶ The harm that accumulates in that interval outlasts a repair reimbursement. Airlines lose or damage approximately 29 chairs per day, and each chair belongs to a person whose body depends on that specific fit.

Scalesse's public documentation practice accomplished what the DOT complaint system had not: it moved a carrier within days on a claim that the formal process had let accumulate for decades at a rate of approximately 29 chairs per day. The DOT's 2024 rule codified a presumption of violation that disabled travelers had no legal leverage to assert before that rule existed.¹⁴ That regulatory movement required years of collective advocacy, viral documentation, and proposed legislation before the enforcement architecture shifted. Fashion production accessibility has produced no equivalent shift. No federal standard requires accessible production spaces for modeling work; the question of whether the dressing room is reachable remains a pre-booking check that model agencies run, not a legal obligation that venues must meet. The same structural condition underlies both gaps: enforcement mechanisms that assign the burden of documentation and advocacy to the disabled person rather than to the builders of the spaces they cannot reach.

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. Public social documentation moved the carrier faster than the formal complaint process, illustrating navigator-side protest outperforming the regulatory infrastructure designed to handle the same failure.

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 (June 2024)
-- 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 inaccessible dressing room Scalesse encountered at earlier jobs.

• 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 moved in the direction Scalesse and others had advocated for, though it did not achieve the broader legislation they had sought.¹⁴
• 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.¹⁸

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. Milwaukee Art Museum Blog: Functional Fashions ↩

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

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

11. Dazed: Why is fashion so afraid of disabled models? ↩

12. Philippa Nesbitt, "Paradox of Visibility," Fashion Studies, 2025 ↩

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

14. U.S. Department of Transportation: Secretary Buttigieg Announces Sweeping Protections for Airline Passengers with Disabilities ↩ ↩² ↩³

15. Mia Mingus, "Access Intimacy: The Missing Link," Leaving Evidence, May 5, 2011 ↩

16. Tobin Siebers, "Disability Aesthetics," University of Michigan Press, 2010 ↩

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

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