For most people, dressing is a routine activity that requires little conscious thought. For someone with limited hand strength, reduced mobility, or a body that conventional clothing was never designed to accommodate, however, the same routine can take much longer and may require assistance.
A button that takes most people two seconds to fasten might take several minutes for a person with a disability. A pair of jeans may be impossible to wear without help. In Bangladesh, the solution often comes from family members or neighbourhood tailors altering standard garments to meet individual needs, not from the fashion industry itself.
This gap is striking given who makes the clothes. Bangladesh, an economy built on scale, cost efficiency and technical capability, is one of the world's leading garment manufacturers. Yet despite supplying leading global brands, the country has not turned these advantages into a meaningful domestic adaptive clothing sector, leaving many Bangladeshis with disabilities or mobility-related challenges underserved as consumers.
Adaptive fashion is often mistaken for medical wear or a separate style category. In reality, it refers to ordinary clothing designed to make dressing easier and more comfortable for persons with disabilities, chronic illnesses or temporary physical impairments, without compromising on style.
Examples include magnetic fastenings instead of fiddly buttons, trousers cut to sit properly on a wheelchair user instead of bunching up, and smooth seams for anyone who finds regular stitching uncomfortable against the skin. The difference lies in how the clothing functions, even when it blends into mainstream fashion.
According to Grand View Research, the global adaptive clothing market was valued at $1.53 billion in 2025, although estimates vary by definition and is expected to keep growing. Recent market analyses suggest that ageing populations, disability-rights advocacy and e-commerce have all contributed to the rise in demand.
In 2022, The Daily Star profiled Dhaka-based designer Tania Afroz, who experimented with adaptive clothing at the request of a customer with accessibility requirements. Her designs included a gender-neutral flight suit created to make dressing and using the restroom easier for people with disabilities in their daily lives. At the time, the initiative seemed to open up a new opportunity for the country's fashion industry, one that could address real problems faced by people with disabilities.
However, although the 2022 initiative showed that adaptive fashion could be designed and produced locally, there is little evidence that it grew into a sustained commercial movement. Adaptive fashion remains largely invisible in the country's wider fashion landscape. What appeared to be the dawn of a promising opportunity remained an isolated experiment rather than the start of a new industry.
For Ramisa Rahman Tanha, a fashion design graduate of BGMEA University of Fashion & Technology, the issue began long before she encountered the term "adaptive fashion." As a child, she watched her cousin with autism struggle with clothing. Later, she saw similar difficulties in a neighbour's daughter, who also has autism and often refused to wear clothes because they made her uncomfortable.
The child's discomfort was not occasional. A tag could press against her neck. A loose thread could irritate her skin continuously. She disliked zippers, heavy layers and certain textures. When the discomfort became overwhelming, she would try to remove her clothes, which was not always possible in public.
Years later, when choosing a final university project, Tanha decided to tackle a problem that clothing could help solve. She chose adaptive fashion, narrowing her focus to children with autism.
Tanha explained that clothing for a child with autism cannot be treated as equivalent to clothing for a person with a physical disability. Autism may involve different sensory experiences, such as hypersensitivity and hyposensitivity, while physical disability encompasses a wide range of mobility and functional needs. As a result, Tanha said, "Specific designs or customised dresses are needed."
An irritating seam, a pinching tag or an uncomfortable fabric can affect a child's concentration and participation at school. Tanha emphasised that if a child with autism is uncomfortable in their clothes, they may struggle to focus on classroom activities meant to support their cognitive and physical development. It comes down to removing one source of discomfort from a child's daily life.
Asked why such a gap exists, Tanha identified family awareness as the first major obstacle. Parents are often reluctant to accept that their child has autism, and even after accepting the diagnosis, they may not immediately realise that clothing contributes to the child's discomfort. A child's refusal to wear certain garments may be read as difficult behaviour rather than a response to a tag, seam, texture, zipper or heavy layer.
"If it does not exist, they won't know about it," she said, describing the relationship between awareness and availability.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: when adaptive clothing is absent from store shelves, families are rarely prompted to imagine alternative designs. Consequently, the demand remains invisible because it is seldom expressed.
On the supply side, the gap is even more pronounced.
According to Tanha, the lack of specialised raw materials is another obstacle. Bangladesh does not yet have easy access to the range of fabric textures and materials that different adaptive needs require. In other markets, specialised and categorised sourcing is more common.
Fabrics may be selected specifically for sensory sensitivities, mobility requirements or ease of dressing. The texture of the fabric may matter as much as the design of the fastening: a heavy material may be unsuitable for one wearer, while a rough seam or loose thread may be unbearable for another.
Tailors and small businesses, meanwhile, sell almost entirely to the general population, and there is little of the research needed to develop adaptive product categories. Such research would need to examine fabrics, textures, fastenings, garment construction and the needs associated with different conditions.
It would also require input from doctors, therapists, caregivers, disability organisations and people with disabilities themselves, who can offer knowledge that fashion education does not usually cover. Without such collaboration, designers risk creating garments that appear inclusive but do not address the wearer's actual needs. "Designers need expert help," Tanha said.
A similar gap surfaced from outside the country as well.
Taiyeba Abedin Wafa, a Bangladeshi student of creative design at ESMOD in Paris, had not encountered the term "adaptive fashion" in her coursework either.
Once the concept was explained, she pointed to Decathlon as an example worth noting: a mainstream sportswear brand that offers adaptive products, including easy-fasten sportswear and underwear, with dedicated products and sections in some markets, rather than treating the category as an entirely separate specialist industry. Tommy Hilfiger also runs a full adaptive line, and Nike sells FlyEase sneakers designed for easy entry, with laceless closures such as straps or zips, and some hands-free models.
Wafa also connected the discussion to her own academic work. In a project on how bodies change through weight gain, weight loss and growth, she studied how garments such as corsets and sarees can be designed to accommodate a changing body rather than resist it.
From there, she suggested that unstitched clothing could be useful for children with autism, as it may allow them to wear garments in ways that feel more comfortable instead of forcing them into a fixed, stitched shape. She was careful to add, however, that the fabric would still need to be selected deliberately; leaving a garment loose would not, by itself, make it adaptive.
The opportunity extends beyond social responsibility. According to the World Health Organization, roughly one in six people worldwide lives with some form of disability. Market insights also suggest that ageing populations will expand demand for clothing that is easier to wear. Adaptive fashion can therefore be seen as both a domestic and a global opportunity for Bangladesh to diversify what it manufactures.
This does not mean the industry must be built from scratch. One retailer could launch a small accessible line, a fashion school could incorporate adaptive design into a single course brief, or an export-focused manufacturer could test a short domestic run to gauge demand. What is missing is the will to revive an idea that was once tried.
In the end, the irony is difficult to ignore. Bangladesh has a garment industry capable of making millions of garments for people across the world, yet adaptive fashion is struggling to find a place in its domestic market.
The country has a strong manufacturing base and a large pool of local retailers and entrepreneurs, but whether they will use these resources to introduce adaptive product categories remains uncertain. The question, then, is whether adaptive fashion will be treated as an innovation or remain a largely unexplored opportunity in Bangladesh's apparel sector