Continuing my endeavor to get some of my more substantial threads off of Twitter and into more accessible format, this post is adapted and expanded from a thread about the intersection of movement issues in autism and clothing I wrote a little while ago.

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“How can you possibly make the most of your life and achieve the things you want to achieve when you aren’t comfortable or catered to in your clothing?” asks an advertisement for Dewey Clothing, which makes clothing specifically designed for people under five feet tall, that came across my social media feed recently.

This is an issue I have seen addressed with regard to clothing design for people with various disabilities—there are clothing lines in particular for wheelchair users and people with Down Syndrome—and yet don’t feel I’ve seen asked in a deeply useful way when it comes to autistic people, or that we’ve even known how to ask ourselves due to some of the ways in which we’re accustomed to talking about autism as well as the fact that we still simply are not given good language for so many of our experiences.

This dovetails with something I was wondering about tangentially as I was working on another piece of writing about the feedback loops that exist between autistic movement differences, “dialects” of movement, and the communication breakdowns that lead to autistic people’s characterization as poor communicators and to our further marginalization.

Are autistic people, over the course of our lives, being stressed out, having issues like motor impairments or inertia worsened over time, or even being subtly injured, just because shoes and clothing aren’t made for us and the ways we move? For the ways our bodies change over time specifically because of our movement differences, in ways that are subtly different from those of non-autistic people?

Are autistic people suffering not just irritation or distress but further disablement because our clothing, by and large, isn’t made with us in mind?

So for instance, when I see things like shoes supposedly made for autistic people, they’ll be made of soft fabrics, not require tying, or have cartoon characters on them.

And that stuff can definitely be good and necessary for some of us, but it misses the mark in important ways for me.

Because what I really need in a shoe as a result of being autistic, is wider soles, extra heel height and support (because long-term toe-walking has changed the musculature of my legs), and extra ball-of-foot support to counteract the fact that I tend to overpronate. I have a rolling walk, which affects how my shoes incur wear and tear over time, and there seems to be something slightly asymmetrical about my gait, because I suffer constantly from shoes being fine on my left and chewing my foot raw on the right. ¹

I’ve also heard more than one fellow autistic person wonder about how quickly we seem to wear out shoes, and while this is highly speculative on my part, I do wonder if it could be true that we wear through shoes faster on average for a combination of reasons: Because we may have atypical gaits, because we tend to be such creatures of habit and therefore rotate shoes less, or because it is so much harder for us to find comfortable shoes in the first place and so we tend to over-wear the ones we find, because we’re more likely to live in poverty, chronic under-employment, or inadequate housing and therefore simply own fewer shoes than most people with adequate income and housing who have less specific needs.

When I buy clothing these days, I can fairly easily find necklines cut low enough for me, fabrics that are soft enough, things that are seamless or tagless, and sometimes even half-length sleeves (but that’s also an alteration I can easily have made to a shirt I otherwise like). But I still have a harder time finding women’s clothing that fundamentally hangs on my body right. Or doesn’t twist or fall down my shoulders or bunch up weirdly when I walk.

And some of that is probably because I’m kind of pear-shaped, proportioned weirdly, and in constant between-sizes hell even though on paper I’m a woman of entirely average weight and height, but some of it, I think, is because I move both more and differently.

Other women seem to hold their bodies in a way that makes the way clothing is built…work right. And I don’t.

When it first started to become common to hold meetings online rather than in person after the pandemic made Zoom a ubiquitous meeting tool, I looked at myself on screen at one point and realized, “Wow, I move a lot” compared to other participants. Not even in big ways like shifting or gesturing or changing position, but in that I almost always looked like I was in some kind of minute movement even when I felt like I was being still, unless I concentrated very hard on not being. ² (I wondered only half-facetiously if this could have something to do with why I could not for the life of me find a bra that will stay on my body right for the entirety of a day, or not constantly slip off my right shoulder but not my left. I’ve since found that even if a bra fits correctly, I do better with bras that themselves have as few adjustable features or “moving parts” as possible.)

And whenever I try to explain to someone that yes, I think that dress is cute, but that I can tell it won’t work for me, almost invariably I get told “No, you’re not fat!”

But that’s not the problem.

(And to be perfectly clear, fat people should also be able to buy flattering clothing that works on their bodies without this much trouble.)

I just curve differently than other women. I carry weight and tension differently and I can feel how much whether or not I feel right in my clothes affects my inertia, and the tension in my shoulders, and that in turn affects whether I look awkward or spend all day fidgeting or picking at my clothes, or wanting to tear my skin off.

And that stuff, in turn, affects not just how I’m seen by others but how well I feel like I can move.

As genuinely glad as I am that the sensory aspects of autism are much better recognized now than they used to be, I think sometimes they’ve become over-emphasized as far as what makes something better or worse for us. There is often a tendency to over-attribute to sensory challenges things that can be far more complicated or originate from a different aspect of autism entirely. I also think that sensory processing issues and other facets of autism like movement challenges and intolerance of unpredictability can be entangled and mutually reinforcing in ways that defy attempts to attribute them to a single cause.

Yes, tagless and seamless clothing design matters, but I think “sensory friendliness” goes a lot deeper than those things. Or whether a fabric is too rough or too fuzzy. I think movement differences may have at least as much to do with whether something works for us as the kinds of things we typically think of as “sensory” issues.

This is a direction I’d love to see research on sensorimotor differences in autism go in—whether we come down with different repetitive motion or stress injuries than non-autistic people do simply because we’re constantly coping with clothing that forces us to use our bodies wrong.

It’s also something I’d love to see fashion designers take up, but (short of just getting rich enough to have a personal tailor) it feels hopeless compared to other kinds of sensory adjustments that are both easier to make and more readily appeal even to non-autistic people in a way that sells well. This seems far too niche given how relatively few of us there are, and how much autistic people can differ even from each other in hyperspecific ways.

Another pervasive oversight is that it seems like a lot of the clothing being targeted towards autistic people as “sensory friendly” assumes that we’re not actually working. But I don’t just need t-shirts and stretch pants. I need professional-looking clothing that takes these issues into account. You can make my shoes with soft fabric or no ties, but how are my knees and hips going to feel after I’ve been running around in them on concrete floors backstage for ten or twelve hours?

This becomes one of the problems of considering autism primarily a children’s issue and not a lifespan one, and I get how this might seem trivial compared to some of the support needs of those of us who can’t and likely will never work, but there’s also an element of self-fulfilling prophecy involved: When it’s assumed we will not work, we’re deprived of the kinds of resources that most people take for granted—and how would this not contribute to our challenges with employment and how other people see us in the professional world?

I also think about the fact that heart disease is one of the top three killers of autistic people. How connected could that be to under-recognition of our movement problems, and how much are those being compounded by shoes and clothing that literally make it harder and more uncomfortable for us to move?

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1. I’m not sure just how much the market has changed since I first wrote this thread several years ago, but I did find at least one company making shoes with features tailored to a handful of common foot and gait conditions, including overpronation. Obviously this still represents a fairly limited range of options. ↩︎
2. Mel Baggs wrote about a similar experience of “background” vs. voluntary movement in this old post. ↩︎