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	TX: 09.03.05 - Disabled Fashion Firm PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON

	THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 麻豆约拍 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. ROBINSON Most of us sometimes have problems finding clothes that fit really well but some consumers can't find anything to fit them in high street stores. Some people with disabilities, for example, and many wheelchair users have to have their clothes specially made, it's an expensive business. But for almost 25 years now a company called Fashion Services in Bradford has offered a solution. The company designs and makes bespoke garments and then sells them on at high street prices. Now though the charity which funds this venture is running out of sponsors and as a result the business may soon close. Judy Merry has been to meet the staff at Fashion Services and some of their customers. ROYSTON Here's a pair of trousers and if I hold those folded up straight you'll see that the waistband at the back is a lot higher than at the front, it's almost a quarter circle - is the waistband. If you sit down in trousers normally you end up with a gap across your kidneys, well when you're sat all the time you don't want that. MERRY Ann Royston was born with a soft bone condition and as a result she's just under three feet eight inches tall and she permanently uses a wheelchair. ROYSTON You don't get things in my length, in my width. Remember too that because I can't walk and I'm in a wheelchair all the time I use my arms for everything. So I have a very broad back, very strong upper arms, an ordinary blouse, many a time, I can't even get the sleeve up my arm and if I get it big enough to get it up my arm it's so big across the body that it hangs off me and the sleeves fall off the end of my hands. MERRY So what sort of clothes can you simply not buy on the high street? ROYSTON I can't buy trousers, I can't buy skirts, I can't buy dresses, I can't buy blouses. MERRY What does it mean to you to be able to have clothes that actually - were made for you? ROYSTON Oh it's bliss. MERRY It's not just women who feel this is an essential service, Chris Pearman has been in a wheelchair since a medical accident seven years ago. PEARMAN You cannot go into a shop and buy something like a pair of trousers and they fit you. If you do you're at least three quarters mooning, as I call it, because they do not go up your back when you're sat in a wheelchair. So what you have to do is have your trousers made, so that they're not just straight across but from the first six inches from the front they start to go up and up at the back, so you're up about eight inches and then that covers your bottom and keeps you as per a normal pair of trousers would in an able bodied person. SEWING MACHINE NOISE MERRY Ann and Chris are just two of the 350 regular customers who have their clothes made-to-measure by Fashion Services. Many are local but 41% are outside the Bradford area, and some live as far away as Scotland and Cornwall. Sandra Hunt has been the chief pattern cutter for the past 12 years. HUNT The designs of the garments and pattern cutting of the garment is quite unique. From the pattern book standards we have to break those rules, quite a lot of people with spina bifida and scoliosis have a different one side to the other - so there's a left and a right of every garment. MERRY So the left and the right would have to be different? HUNT Completely different, yes. And some of the curves with someone with osteoporosis and scoliosis - unusual curves with the spine being of an S shape or a curvature of the back, either leaning to one side or leaning forward, we readjust the balance and then the garment hangs properly. MERRY Because every customer of Fashion Services has a unique problem it means that the cost of creating a garment is very high. Sandra remembers the challenge of trying to design a coat for a child in a wheelchair which had both a headrest and an armrest. HUNT I spent about a good five minutes looking at him and just couldn't imagine or think of a way round this. I just sat for a whole day just trying to think of a way to start this design and we managed it, did the design, it took quite some doing. But it looked great, it fit great, but then the cost of the garment - I think the mum paid about 拢80 and the little boy was only about eight years old, and that's for a coat. But the true cost of that garment would have been well over a thousand pounds. MERRY The difference between the actual cost of creating one of these made-to-measure garments and the price the customer pays is funded by a charity - Friends of Fashion Services - and this is under threat. The project has to find between eighty and a hundred thousand pounds every year to survive. When it was set up in 1981 it was supported by Bradford College, then it was funded by the local authority and more recently it was given a three year grant by the mortgage lender Northern Rock. But now the funding has all but dried up, in fact just a couple of days after I visited Fashion Services Sandra left the company because her future was so uncertain. Hazel Howard is the chair of the board of trustees for Friends of Fashion Services. HOWARD Every garment that we make pretty well is loss making. MERRY Because they're tailor-made for people and their particular problems? HOWARD Yeah absolutely. A lot of our customers don't actually recognise that because we don't push in their faces how much this has really cost and you're only paying like a high street equivalent, because we don't want to make them feel charity cases. MERRY If you don't get funding what's going to happen? HOWARD We can limp along till July but if we don't get anymore funding then it goes, there's no alternative. MERRY Chris Leslie is the MP for Shipley and Fashion Services is in his constituency. He thinks funding has been a problem because no one sees it as their responsibility. He's now trying to find a way to help the charity survive. LESLIE I'm trying my best to speak to a number of different public sector organisations, including the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward. It would be a complete false economy to let this charity fold and let it go and I'm going to work as hard as I can to help them out. MERRY Are you optimistic they will survive? LESLIE Yeah I am. I think for some years they've gone from one source of funding to another, to another and it's not very stable, we need to get them onto a long term footing. I'm absolutely confident there must be a solution here somewhere. MERRY If a solution isn't found then the customers who rely on Fashion Services will be the ones to lose out. ROYSTON I wonder how many of the people listening to us today have just one shop in the whole country that they can get clothing from. PEARMAN It will be a sad for disability if it goes away. You're taking effectively something away from disabled people because surely disabled people have the right to dress as able bodied people and go out with that confidence and self esteem. ROBINSON Chris Pearman. And since Judy Merry compiled that report Yorkshire Forward announced that it will be giving 拢25,000 to Fashion Services, not enough to save the company but certainly a step in the right direction. 听 Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 麻豆约拍 is not responsible for external websites

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