Weldun Is Rethinking How We Dress Through Every Stage Of Life

From clothing for surgery and recovery to pieces that make dressing easier through injury, pregnancy, disability and aging, Weldun is rethinking how you shop for yourself, or someone you love, without compromising personal style.

Fashion has always had a complicated relationship with the changing body.

We are expected to dress for our bodies, shop for our bodies and learn which silhouettes supposedly "work" for them, while the clothes themselves remain remarkably inflexible. When our bodies change through disability, surgery, illness, pregnancy, menopause, aging or simply life, finding something that works can suddenly become much harder. And too often, the options that acknowledge those realities are separated from fashion altogether.

It is a strange disconnect when one considers how ordinary physical change actually is. There is, as the premise behind new fashion marketplace Weldun puts it, "no fixed body."

Weldun, founded by artist and designer Carly Berlin, is building a shopping destination for people navigating physical change, one place to find beautiful, thoughtfully designed products that consider how our bodies actually live and change. Whether shopping for yourself or someone you love, the premise is simple: function and style shouldn't have to be separate.

Berlin arrived at the idea through her own experience, following a prophylactic double mastectomy, she found herself looking for clothing she could wear after surgery that could accommodate what her body needed during recovery without asking her to abandon her personal style.

"When I was recovering from surgery, I was shocked by how few options there were, and that no single place existed to bring beautiful, functional clothing together," Berlin says. "But what started as frustration became curiosity. The more I talked to other women, the more I realized how many of us had experienced some version of the same thing. The circumstances were different, but the feeling was the same: our bodies had changed, and suddenly getting dressed became harder. I began to notice how our culture treats a changing body as the exception, when it's actually one of the most inevitable human experiences there is."

As a disabled woman, I have spent much of my life thinking about accessibility and the assumptions we make about who something is designed for. Fashion is full of them. We tend to categorize functionality as something required by a particular group of people, rather than something that can make a product better for many different people, for many different reasons.

A magnetic fastening might give someone with limited dexterity greater independence. It might also be useful to someone recovering from surgery. A flexible waistband could accommodate a medical device, bloating, pregnancy, menopause, weight fluctuation or simply the fact that a person's body at 8 a.m. does not necessarily feel exactly the same at 8 p.m.

That thinking is central to Weldun. Rather than organizing its marketplace around a diagnosis, disability or life stage, clothing is mapped across four functionality categories, Easy On / Easy Off, Sensory-Considered, Flexible Fit, and Healing and Recovery. The categories were developed collaboratively with Weldun's advisors, accessibility experts and people with a wide range of lived experiences, and are intended to give shoppers more information about what clothing actually does, rather than prescribing who should wear it.

Functionality in fashion has often been treated as something specialized, separated by diagnosis, disability or a particular life stage and too often considered independently from desirability. Weldun is taking a different approach. Rather than creating another category of fashion, it looks at clothing that already exists across fashion and asks different questions about it. How easy is this to put on? How does the fabric feel against sensitive skin? Can its fit accommodate a body that fluctuates? Could it work during recovery? Does its construction offer someone more ease or independence? Weldun intentionally resists being described as an adaptive marketplace because its premise is broader, functionality should not have to exist in a separate fashion universe at all.

The launch brings together brands including Kallmeyer, Another Tomorrow, Mansur Gavriel, Rag & Bone, The Park, STILL HERE, Cecilia, H-O-R-S-E and Underwater Weaving Studio. Many of the pieces were not originally designed or marketed around a particular physical need. Instead, Weldun identifies functionality already present in beautifully designed products and makes it easier for shoppers to find and understand. Its debut campaign, photographed by Paola Kudacki, similarly avoids presenting one archetype of the Weldun customer, instead featuring six women with different lived experiences, some visible, some hidden, some present from birth and others acquired over time.

There is something refreshing about that breadth because disability itself has taught me how limiting our assumptions about bodies can be. We often think we can look at someone and understand what they need. We cannot. We also tend to imagine accessibility as a permanent requirement belonging to a fixed population, when many of us will move in and out of different access needs throughout our lives.

That makes Weldun's potential audience expansive because physical change isn't a niche experience. Someone may arrive because they have lived with a disability their entire life. Someone else may be looking for clothing after breast surgery or another medical procedure and discovering needs they have never encountered before. Another person may be dealing with an injury, the physical effects of an illness, pregnancy, postpartum or menopause. Someone may simply be getting older. And just as often, the shopper may not be shopping for themselves at all, but looking for a thoughtful gift that is useful for a parent, partner, friend or loved one whose needs have changed.

Alongside the marketplace, the company has launched Wel Said, its editorial and community platform, with interviews, profiles, expert perspectives, resources and stories about the lived experiences that shape how people move through the world. Its quarterly Weldun Voices series will spotlight women whose lived experiences have influenced culture, beginning with the late Gloria Steinem.

Weldun also acknowledges that no single platform can meet the full range of needs across every body and experience. Instead, the company describes what it is building as something that will continue to evolve alongside its community, advisors and brand partners.

Weldun has brought that perspective into its wider approach to accessibility, working with advisors including KR Liu, Christina Mallon and MagnaReady founder Maura Horton, alongside accessibility consultancy Tilting the Lens.

Fashion has spent enormous energy teaching us how to accommodate clothing, what to squeeze into, what to avoid, what supposedly flatters us, what size we should aspire to become. There is something powerful about reversing that relationship and asking clothing to do more of the accommodating. Because a changing body shouldn't require someone to compromise their sense of style.

Berlin ends, "What's a necessity for one person is almost always a convenience for everyone else." Fashion has an opportunity to design for that reality from the beginning. Weldun is betting that people are ready for a fashion destination they can turn to when their bodies or needs change, whether they're shopping for what their own body needs today or trying to better support someone they love.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com