Photo: Getty Images
Runway model Aariana Rose Philip made fashion history as the first wheelchair user to ever attend the Met Gala on Monday (May 4).
According to Vogue, Philip is an Antiguian-American model and musician with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
She was also featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Costume Art” exhibition, which explores the concept of the dressed body, and in Vogue’s May issue, which was tied to the event.
Phillip served as a model for one of the exhibition’s mannequins and was photographed in a look designed by Linderoth’s Lou Dehrot.
“For so long, disabled people were not represented anywhere. The thought of even being able to exist at an event like this… nobody even went there,” Philip told the outlet. “To go from that to now, somehow finding myself there, I can’t say how blessed and honored I feel attending.”
In 2018, Philip became the first Black, transgender, and physically disabled model to be represented by a major modeling agency, according to Pink News.
She also made history in 2021 as the first disabled model in a wheelchair to hit the runway for a major luxury fashion brand — Moschino — during New York Fashion Week.
“The reaction that I’ve been getting on my Vogue debut has been so supportive—and I love how they told the story of the exhibition through us models,” she said. “Then, with the gala—this whole thing was unbeknownst to me. I had already booked Vogue, and I thought to myself, ‘This is it.’ This is the tippity top of the pitch. Girls, I’ve made it.”
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