By Kayla Norris
“Just because my body is covered in scars does not make me any less of a person who is worthy of being on the catwalk and shining in the spotlight.”
Boun, a 20-year-old student at Appalachian State University, is a natural. She sits with confidence in a desk chair across from a vanity as stylists touch up her makeup and hair with practiced ease. Her team and I sit around her, forming a circle with Boun at our center. We all listen with rapt attention as she tells us her story. In between her hair being gelled back and her eyeshadow being smoked out, she answers my questions with an air of assurance and poise.
She introduces herself by her full name, Bounlod, which she says is a combination between the words “survivor” and “miracle.” These definitions are fitting, given the story she tells me almost immediately after. She recalls some of the most harrowing moments of her life, starting with a house fire that she was in at only twelve days old.
She was “supposed to die,” Boun said. She had a 3% chance of surviving her injuries from the fire, but like her name suggests, she survived.
In her home country of Laos, she was not able to receive the medical attention that she needed, Boun said. She came to the United States when a man from Canada began sponsoring her medical treatment and surgeries at four years old. At 13, she decided that she wanted to stay in America after years of traveling back and forth to Laos.
“I decided to stay here in America because I did not receive education because of discrimination in Laos,” Boun said.
As she tells me this story, she is dressed in a cropped button down that shows off her chest. She is wearing a baggy pair of jeans with maroon boxers peeking out from the top, and a pair of glossy Doc Martens. When asked what the inspiration for this outfit was, Boun and head stylist Jaidyn Toomey said they wanted to go for an androgynous, “badass” look. The Calvin Klein-esque outfit, paired with the slicked back hair and the smoked out eye all work together to achieve an air of cool confidence.
“I always see fashion with people with abled bodies,” Boun said. “I feel like there needs to be more representation for people with disabled bodies, especially with scars.”
She said she was drawn to this shoot specifically to show everyone that “no matter what you look like, you will look gorgeous either way.”
In this vein, she expresses a frustration with how the fashion industry handles representation currently. She talks about how the industry has a reputation for “covering up” disabled models, in an odd paradox of trying to provide representation but trying to hide the person’s disability.
She relates this to her own personal experience, as she has been pressured for most of her life to seek out prosthetics for her arms and plastic surgery for her chest.
“I was pushed to do that a lot,” Boun said. “I was pushed like, ‘you should get prosthetic hands’ or ‘you would look more normal, you would look more like a human being, like any other person.’”
She also talks about the pressure to get breasts, saying “I feel like that was in more, like, a society way, like wanting me to look more girly, more female and just able-bodied as much as I can be. Though I don’t feel comfortable having a breast, I choose not to get breasts… and I don’t want to have a prosthetic arm.”
She relates this to how the fashion industry goes about representation, how it tends to cover up disabilities rather than showing them off. She mentions how seeing people in wheelchairs and people with scars makes her feel represented and how she wants to see less of people’s disabilities being covered up. She acknowledges that the fashion industry is making progress, but feels that it still has a long way to go.
Boun believes people can be better allies to those with disabilities both inside and outside of the fashion industry.
“I feel like people should definitely do more studying and discovering how to be more of an ally.”
When it comes to the fashion industry specifically, she talks about how inaccessible clothes are for disabled people. She says, “I hope that in the future they design clothes that look good, but are also accessible for us and not like khakis… just more clothes that we can wear on our own.”
In a broader sense, she wants people to know more about the struggles of trying to get a job as a disabled person. She says that people should be more engaged with helping those with disabilities, specifically that they should know more about the limitations of the ADA, which stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was passed in 1990 to legally protect Americans with disabilities from facing discrimination. Although this does exist, Boun says that she wants more people to be aware of how it can fall short. She said, “just because we have the ADA does not mean it’s guaranteed to help a lot of us.” As she goes on to express, the ADA fails in guaranteeing her employment or proper accommodations.
“Clothing, or anything in our world in general, is not and has never been designed for people with physical disabilities,” Boun said at the end of our conversation. “We want to look well and feel confident in ourselves, just like every other walking person on this planet, and we want to be able to express ourselves via fashion. Just because my body is covered in scars does not make me any less of a person who is worthy of being on the catwalk and shining in the spotlight.”
