Hair and Care: Anna Cofone Creates Access to Fashion for Blind and Low Vision Women and Girls
Anna Cofone is a British hairstylist well known for styling the likes of Dua Lipa and Lana Del Rey. In 2019, she launched the Hair & Care Project, which offers workshops to blind and low vision women and girls. Through these sessions, professional hair stylists show them how to do their hair, advise them on style, and empower them to be more self-confident about their looks.
Anna Cofone’s father started losing his vision before she was born. He loved fashion, but was immediately excluded from it. Witnessing this, Cofone wanted to enable blind and low-vision women and girls to play around with trends, understand their hair better, and then make their own decisions about how they want to style themselves.
The Hair & Care Project
Cofone went to various organizations and talked to blind people to find out their access needs, what they would like to learn in a hair and care workshop, and then, together with two other women, created a taskforce to find brands and organizations to fund the project. Because the workshops, which are primarily held in Hackney, London, are completely free and are all held by professional stylists, it couldn’t and cannot work without funding. “We have around 12 participants in the workshops, and try to make sure that they are all accompanied by a stylist when we do training sessions,“ Cofone says. The workshops became a major success within the British blind community, but Cofone wanted to take it further. “The problem is that blind and low vision people aren’t being seen in the fashion world. Our society hasn’t yet realized that blind people could be into fashion, and that a lot of them do care about their appearance.“
Seeing and being seen
In many ways, Cofone is right. The most common stereotype around blind people is that they cannot choose their own outfits or style themselves. However, we live in a visual world, and if a blind person wants to be part of it, they may well want to look good—not just because they want to please the visual world, but first and foremost because they want to feel self-confident.
Jennifer Sonntag, a blind German journalist and influencer, once said in an interview that when you are blind, you need to find ways to present yourself and your identity without being able to actually visually understand them. As a result, many blind people prefer to stay in the background, fearing they might not get their message across. And as long as the fashion industry is not accessible, it will always be more challenging for blind people to find their style and identity.
Cofone recognized this challenge and took her project a step further by initiating “Making Fashion Accessible”.
Making Fashion Accessible
The goal behind “Making Fashion Accessible” is to convince designers to add audio descriptions to their fashion shows, which Cofone and her team would provide, and to offer blind and low-vision people the opportunity to experience the outfits a week before the show, when they can also ask questions.
One of Cofone’s personal highlights was when “Making Fashion Accessible“ managed to get blind fashion influencer and journalist Lucy Edwards to appear as a model at the Copenhagen Fashion Week in 2024. She walked for designer Sinead O’Dwyer, one of the experts working with Cofone’s “Hair & Care.” Edwards was joined by her guide dog, Miss Molly. “We spent four hours with Lucy and her guide dog Miss Molly a day before the show. And it wasn’t just a walk straight down the catwalk, but it was going in and out of the audience. At one point, Miss Molly got tired and just had enough, and I bought bacon treats. There were art installations right in the way of their walk, so they were actual barriers that they had to walk around, and I remember wrapping bacon around these art installations so that Miss Molly would navigate around them and centralize herself again,“ Confone remembers. She understands that style is a way of self-expression. Even so, accessible fashion stores are rare to this day. Often a blind person would be looked at with a mixture of astonishment and fear when they enter a hairdresser’s shop. Cofone wants to change that. The best way to do that is to empower role models such as Lucy Edwards to show herself and a designer’s collection at an event as big as Copenhagen Fashion Week.
Blind people as part of the mainstream fashion industry
For a long time, disability was seen as incompatible with the glitz and glamour of fashion. But the tide is turning. Major publications like “British Vogue” have begun showcasing disabled models, signaling a long-overdue shift. Still, blind people remain vastly underrepresented, even in diversity-focused campaigns. Whether due to fear of the unknown or persistent structural hurdles, the fashion world still hesitates to fully embrace blindness. This is precisely why Anna Cofone’s work is so crucial.
By teaching practical skills through “Hair & Care” and breaking down barriers on international runways, Cofone is driving a cultural shift. As more brands realize that blind and low-vision individuals are active consumers with a voice, actual inclusion becomes reachable. “Hair & Care” has generated a movement that is simply too visible to be ignored.
