Guest Post: Empowering Women through Adaptable Swimwear
By: Maria Luisa Mendiola
Growing up, I always felt different. Not only did I grow up with a lot of opinions in a conservative, Catholic, Latin American town, but I knew that I would never fit in because of how I looked. I was born with a genetic condition that caused my feet to have brachymetatarsia, meaning I have shortened 4th toes on both of my feet.
Because this affects my feet, I can hide my disfigurement all year around. Some in the visible difference community may call this a privilege, I call it a crux—a particular point of difficulty in daily life. Every time I had no option but being barefoot, whether I was in a doctor’s appointment, at a yoga studio or at the beach, I would be consumed in thought. The feelings that would usually live under the rug would rise to the surface, leaving me paralyzed in shame and painfully uncomfortable with my vulnerability.
A couple of years back, a friend asked me, “What’s wrong with your toes?” I became very uncomfortable, and quickly changed the subject. I remember thinking, how is it possible that I am 25 years old and I still react like this when someone asks me about my feet? It dawned on me that this question was always going to come up, no matter how old I was. All I could change was how I reacted to it.
As luck would have it, that same month I started my master’s at Central Saint Martins, UK, where we were asked to reflect on our own personal experiences as a way to find a problem to solve in the world. I was specifically perturbed by a statistic I had read that more than 80% of women are unhappy with their bodies. As I started focusing on the topic of body image, I realized that a lot of my poor body image came from my experience with disfigurement. I became determined to research the psychology of appearance, and started to work with women that had all different types of disfigurements to design garments inspired by their story. Throughout my journey, I realized that swimwear design coupled with storytelling is a successful method to increase women’s comfort in their bodies. A year later, MIGA Swimwear was born.
MIGA Swimwear is the first-of-its-kind, adaptive swimwear line inspired by and dedicated to women’s stories with disfigurements, disabilities and chronic illnesses. Our mission is to share the stories of women living with different conditions as a way to raise awareness, increase representation, and ultimately, combat stigma. Our brand is not only for women living with disfigurement, disabilities, and/or chronic illnesses. We do not seek inclusion at the expense of excluding other groups. We believe non-disfigured and able-bodied people can reframe how they look at their own bodies, and learn how to accept and love themselves through the lessons of the disfigurement, disability, and chronic illness community.
Image description: A woman wearing a pink swimsuit with yellow details smiles at a camera.
In 2018, we raised upwards of $10,000 to produce our first collection inspired by the stories of burn survivors. This year, the collection features five styles ranging from long-sleeved one-pieces to bikinis with adaptable belts to accommodate more than 25 different diagnoses, including rare diseases like sacrococcygeal tumors, spinal cord injuries, and ostomies.
Earlier this year, I organized and moderated a panel at The Wing, a women-focused co-working space. The panel was titled “Hiring for Disability” and highlighted that while companies that hire people with disabilities double their net income and experience 28% higher revenue, only one-third of working-age disabled people are employed. The panel speakers were all employed women living with different types of disabilities, and they shed light on their experience getting hired and the challenges they faced in terms of accessibility and health-care. Among attendance was a good amount of recruiters and startup founders. Our hope is that by creating more events like these we can get more members of the disability, disfigurement, and chronic illness community hired.
Image Description: A woman in a yellow swimsuit in a wheelchair looks at the camera.
Maria Luisa Mendiola is a Costa Rican body-image champion that has worked in community-building and Diversity and Inclusion for the last 10 years. Her personal experience with disfigurement has led her to found MIGA Swimwear, the first swimwear line inspired by women’s stories with disfigurement, contesting the stigma of looking differently and disrupting the beauty standard. In 2018, Mendiola raised upwards of $10,000 to produce their first collection inspired by the stories of burn survivors. She is also a Keynote speaker on topics such as disfigurement and disability inclusion, and its intersections with gender, policy and the workplace. In communications and culture, she is the content-editor of MIGA Swimwear’s blog. With over 70 entries, the blog showcases women from all over the world living boldly with disfigurement. Through her approach, she continues to raise awareness about this community, in hopes of creating a more accepting and tolerant world.