Roll Models

Fashion Week, the premier event in the American fashion industry, is a must-attend event for thousands of designers, buyers, retailers and members of the national and international press. Every year in February, these fashionistas converge on New York City to seek out the latest in fashion trends and styles. But this year they got an extra surprise.

During 2007 Fashion Week, a group of women who spend their lives in wheelchairs modeled designer outfits and custom-designed wheelchairs at Rolling with Style, a fundraising fashion event to benefit research into spinal cord injury and women's health issues.

The full-scale runway show and celebrity-filled spectacular, held at Manhattan's Cipriani Feb. 6, was the brainchild of Discovery Through Design, an organization celebrating the success of women with spinal cord injuries who serve as role, or in this case, “roll” models.

Hosted by Lesley Stahl of CBS' “60 Minutes,” the event drew more than 500 attendees and raised nearly $1 million for the Christopher Reeve Foundation, The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and The Spinal Cord Injury Project at Rutgers University.

DTD was founded by a group of women in wheelchairs including Marilyn Hamilton, co-founder of Quickie Designs and vice president of consumer relations for Sunrise Medical, along with Wendy Crawford, Ashley Lauren Fisher and Julia Stockton Dorsett.

“The four of us came together because we all had a role in this project,” explains Hamilton. “We are a group of two women in manual wheelchairs and two women in power wheelchairs believing that women with spinal cord injuries are doing more than surviving; we are really thriving in today's society, going after our dreams and doing everything that we like.”

Crawford, a former model, is the developer of www.mobilewomen.org, an informational Web site for women with disabilities. Fisher is an actress and owner of Pazzo Pazzo restaurant in Morristown, N.J. And Dorsett brings a focus on fitness to the group as a professional wheelchair tennis player who represented the United States at the 2004 Paralympics and World Team Cup.

Believing that women in wheelchairs have been overlooked for too long, DTD conducted a nationwide search for roll models to honor at the Rolling with Style event. Their goal was to find women in wheelchairs who are making a valuable contribution to the world while living life to the fullest.