MAKING AN ENTRANCE: Catriona Stewart arrives at Dominatrix Meet & Greet (pic: Tony Mitchell)
Catriona Stewart: designing her way around disability.
Catriona Stewart, disabled latex designer and model, took a decision at the end of 2014 to raise the profile of her brand by attending more events and doing more shows. The appearance of her designs on the catwalk at this March’s Dominatrix weekend certainly gave a kickstart to her expansion plans, and somehow she also found time during the event to talk to Tony Mitchell about the challenges of her disability and the unusual business model she started with. Banner: Toxic Imaging
Her profile has increased substantially since March of this year when she accepted a short-notice invitation to provide a catwalk show at Holland’s Dominatrix party.
The ten working days she had to put together a catwalk collection for the Dominatrix show would have been enough of a struggle for any designer.
But for Catriona, coming up with new outfits was only one of the challenges presented by this opportunity.
The young designer suffers from significantly reduced mobility caused by a combination of scoliosis (for which she had major spinal surgery as a teenager) and being run over by a car while at university.
She wears a permanent leg-brace, walks on crutches and sometimes has to use a wheelchair to get around.
This means that the logistics of attending any fetish event — let alone one involving getting herself and 35 kilos of latex from her East Midlands home to Amsterdam — present problems that more able-bodied people don’t have to worry about.
She tries her best not to let the practicalities get her down, she says. But there are certain aspects of the job — like lifting and carrying — which she always needs help with.
“I have to have an assistant,” she explains as we chat not long after her arrival at the Dominatrix event hotel for the March party.
“It’s just annoying that I can’t do stuff on my own — I’m always asking people to help carry things. Especially with this event, because there’s so much stuff.”
Fortunately she has the assistance on this occasion of her buddy, London dominatrix and party queen Princess Almighty.
I think it would be fair to say that the pair of them — one latex-clad and on crutches, the other togged up in her trademark Kawai doll garb — make a lasting impression on more than a few unsuspecting bystanders during the Dutch fetish weekend.
‘I have to have an assistant. It’s just annoying that I can’t do stuff on my own – I’m always asking people to help carry things. Especially with this event’
Part of the reason Catriona Stewart has not had a higher profile on the scene until this year lies in her decision to remain based in Leicester after graduating from the city’s De Montfort University Contour Fashion course in 2011.
She recognises that not being in London where “there are parties all the time and you can just nip out” is disadvantageous in terms of brand promotion and, specifically, media coverage.
“But then,” she argues, “I do have the advantage of not having stupidly high rent. And I live in a nice house.”
So how did Catriona Stewart, Contour Fashion student, first become interested in latex?
“I’d liked alternative styles before uni,” she explains, “and I chose the Contour Fashion course because I wanted to do corsetry.
“I’d go out when I was 18 and there were bigger girls and they’d have corsets on and looked amazing, with their bust then tiny little waist then their bum at the end of it. It was beautiful.
“But I found it really hard to decide what I wanted to do because uni is very geared towards high street or mainstream sort of things rather than alternative stuff.”
However, things started to fall into place, when, in her second year, she encountered a fellow student who’d made latex clothing.
“He brought in a garment he’d made and I thought, ‘Wow, I really like that’. It looked expensive and well made and it fitted well, which is what the course was trying to teach us to do.
“I said, ‘That’s amazing, I’d love to learn how to do that’. And he just explained to me what he did and it sounded so simple.”
She knew her first few attempts would “look rubbish”. “But with latex clothing the most important thing is the patterns,” she declares. “My early stuff is not very neatly put together but the patterns are what really matter — they’re my kind of area.”
Would Catriona describe herself as a fetishist?
“I haven’t got a latex fetish,” is her reply. “But when I’ve got a catsuit on and it’s shined, it feels really quite comforting, like you’re being stroked.”
Is Catriona a fetishist? ‘I haven’t got a latex fetish,’ she says. ‘But when I’ve got a catsuit on and it’s shined, it feels quite comforting, like you’re being stroked’
“I just get vain. I think I use my disability to feel empowered. I really like my leg brace — I look like a robot. It separates me out from people.”
It means, she explains, that if for example she has to describe herself to someone who’ll be looking for her in a crowd, there’s a big advantage in being able to say: “I’m disabled, I’ve got a leg brace and I walk with crutches. You will find me.”
Although, she adds with a giggle, “I’m very short and people can’t usually see me in a crowd!”
Catriona’s first latex collection was shown at London’s Festival of Sins in June 2010, while she was still studying Contour Fashion at De Montfort.
“Then I dabbled with making myself some stuff. But because I’ve got a weird body, with scoliosis and being hit by the car, my muscle wastage is all over the place. So I can’t really just put stuff on, which is annoying.”
‘Designing’s like a second thing. I can do it but it’s not the bit I really love. When I’m doing patterns, it’s like doing a crossword puzzle – you’re testing your brain’
It took her a while to sort out patterns for herself because of her body shape. For this the course was really helpful, she confirms, “Because I really like pattern cutting and I like getting things to fit to the body — that’s what I really enjoy.
“Designing’s like a second thing. I can do it but it’s not the bit I really love. When I’m doing the patterns, it’s like doing a crossword puzzle or something — you’re testing your brain.”
When she started at uni, Catriona’s general goals were to “get a job, work my way up the ladder, get to a certain point and have my own business”.
But when at the end of her first year in 2008 she got run over, “it kind of ruined things,” she says. “When everyone else was doing internships and work experience, I couldn’t do it.”
But at least, she adds, it saved her from having to do all the “crappy jobs” interns get lumbered with, like making tea.
All in all, Catriona reckons she didn’t benefit from university in the way her fellow students did. “I appreciated the knowledge because I’m using it now, but I didn’t enjoy the ‘uni experience’.
“After I got run over, I felt really excluded and really hurt. I remember hanging about with some people that I thought were friends, and they arranged to go to a pub, but they didn’t ask me.
“I think they probably felt they didn’t want to ask me in case I couldn’t do it,” she concludes.
Although the injuries she sustained compounded her pre-existing disability, she believes that having previously had scoliosis actually made the car accident seem less life-changing.
“If this had happened to somebody who hadn’t had any problems at all, it would have affected them in a worse way,” she reckons.
“I mean, it is really crap: I do get depression, but I know there are ways around it. It is annoying with pain and things because I can’t work as hard as I’d like to.
“I get upset that I can’t work a full-time job, full-time hours and just be high-flying,” she admits.
‘When I was growing up, I wanted to provide for myself. I hate taking money off other people and I wanted to work hard and be like: point proven’
“When I was growing up, I wanted to provide for myself. I hate taking money off other people and I wanted to work hard and be like, ‘look, point proven, I’m working hard and look at everything I can get because of my hard work’.
“But then when I got run over, I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to get a certain status. Not just wealth-wise but the feeling of establishing yourself in a certain job.
“That’s one thing that gets me down more than anything.”
But, I ask, should someone whose disability limits their physical work capabilities be measuring their output against that of more able-bodied people? In other words, isn’t working hard a relative concept?
“Yes, for the last two weeks I’ve worked my tail off, it’s ridiculous!” she laughs. But, she adds:
“I feel sometimes I’m letting myself down if I don’t take advantage of the time I’ve got.”
So she pushes herself? “Yeah, but I push myself too hard. I go to the gym and do physio stuff for my legs and my back.
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Catriona Stewart
Tags: Clothing, Designers, Fashion Shows, Fetish Fairs, Fetish Weekends, Latex, Models
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