Disabled Model Bri Scalesse’s Message: “My Chair Is My Freedom”
Tell disabled model Bri Scalesse that her wheelchair limits how she lives her life, and she will tell you quite the opposite. In fact, she went viral with the powerful statement, “My chair is my freedom.” This resonated strongly with everyone in the disability community and further afield, too. Scalesse’s raison d'être has become confronting the world with the difficulties her disabled brethren face in the everyday world, while also challenging the common perception that wheelchairs are nothing more than limitations on their users.
As a teenager, Scalesse was very insecure about her body
These days, Scalesse has become used to the catwalk, but she hasn’t always been so self-confident. In fact, her teenage self would probably balk at the idea of showing her body off. She told August, a gender-inclusive female sanitary product company, “I was really insecure about my body growing up.”
She continued, “I didn't see anyone that looked like me and all of the models, especially when I was growing up, in magazines, had one very specific body, and that was just never going to be my body. My body has a lot of visible signs of disability, and to me, I wanted to change those things.”
“I wanted to be what I didn’t see”
“I remember wanting to wish away the disabled parts of my body for so long,” confessed Scalesse. “Especially as a teenager, when you’re… coming into your body and you’re starting to have crushes.”
She went on, “And you want people to find you attractive and desirable — and society isn’t saying that disabled people are attractive or desirable.” Despite this, the young girl’s dream was always to become a model. As she put it, “I didn't see models that looked like me, so I wanted to be what I didn’t see.”
Life changed at six years old
Scalesse grew up in Norwich, Connecticut, with her mom and dad, but when she was six years old, tragedy struck. She was in a terrible car accident which took the life of her mom and left her with a devastating spinal injury.
She told August, “There are different levels of the spinal cord where you're injured. So, for me, that means I’m a paraplegic. Depending on where you’re injured, you can be quadriplegic.” It meant she has been a wheelchair-user ever since.
Moving to New York to study
The young girl went to live with her grandmother, whom she has praised for her fiery and determined temperament. When she came of age, Scalesse attended Trinity College in Hartford, where she attained an English degree. She then moved to New York City to complete a Master’s in non-fiction writing at Columbia University.
Getting around the city as a wheelchair-user turned out to be a story with two sides. She revealed, “New York City is incredible as a disabled person and also very hard for a disabled person.”
The paradox of New York as a wheelchair-user
Scalesse explained, “There's an amazing community of wheelchair-users in New York City so that gives me so much life. And being able to just kind of roll anywhere, especially in Manhattan, is really powerful. I can pretty much get anywhere I need to.”
She added, “I grew up in the suburbs and I couldn't just get anywhere I needed to go without a car. And so, it’s really nice to be able to roll places.” Unfortunately, though, the subway isn’t quite as easy to navigate: only 25 percent of stations are wheelchair-accessible.
Moving into modeling
It was while studying at Columbia that Scalesse was able to make her first tentative moves into the world of modeling. She managed to book a campaign with FFORA, a wheelchair-accessory brand specifically designed to put disability first.
She told Today, “I met amazing people on set, which led to different jobs and then I met more amazing people. Everything I have done has been one connection leading to another.” It all led to the Project Runway finale, which was held during New York Bridal Fashion Week.
A pure radiant light
Working with wedding brand THEIA, Scalesse made her way down the catwalk in a gorgeous wedding dress, with her chair adorned with flowers. Don O’Neill, its creative director, posted on Instagram, “We discovered the gorgeous model Bri Scalesse, who embodied the goddess Theia today in her first ever runway show.”
He added that she was “a pure radiant light; the star of the show.” Scalesse was then able to sign with We Speak Model Management, and she was soon plying her trade as a full-time model.
Fulfilling a childhood dream
Over the next few years, Scalesse appeared in shoots for brands as diverse as Nike, Victoria’s Secret, Ugg, Skims, and Google. Being able to fulfil the dream she’d had as a six year old meant the world to her.
She told Today, “It was hard to feel seen in a sense and that my body was desirable and beautiful and wanted and what is right and normal. To now be a part of this representation is really beautiful and overwhelming because I craved it so much when I was little.”
Ableism in modeling
When Scalesse began modeling, though, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The ableism she experienced in the real world was also depressingly present in the modeling sphere. For example, she arrived at one of her first jobs to find that the dressing room was at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs.
Even though the organizers had known she was disabled, no special dispensation had been made for her to get down the stairs safely. She was forced to change for the shoot in the building’s kitchen and bathroom.
Using her platform
In these early days, Scalesse didn’t feel comfortable speaking up about the untenable conditions in which she was working. Yet her modeling career went from strength to strength, and her social media following grew and grew.
And she realized she could use this platform to show the world the issues faced by those in the disability community. These days, the feisty model will always let it be known if something isn’t right — but she still doesn’t feel the onus should be on the model themselves to do that.
Scalesse wants more disabled models
“I don’t think it should be on the model to have to fight so hard to exist somewhere in the same space as other models,” explained Scalesse to Fashion magazine. “Accessibility should be the standard, not an exception.”
Scalesse hopes that constantly pushing this agenda will lead to more disabled models entering the industry. Adamant in her outlook, she maintained, “I want to be in castings, in rooms and on runways with other people in chairs. I don’t want to be the only one at the table.”
Pushing for equality in the industry
For Scalesse, the dream is for disabled models to be regularly included in campaigns alongside able bodied models of all shapes and sizes — and for that to be normalized in the world.
She mused, “Only now are we seeing people with visible disabilities start to be included in the body-positivity movement. I think equality will come when we see disabled models alongside models of all different body types all the time. I want more for my community.”
Catching a flight for a girls’ weekend
Speaking of her community, in May 2021 Scalesse took a trip to Phoenix with her pal Gabrielle deFiebre to meet up with a group of fellow wheelchair-users for a girls’ weekend.
They flew with Delta Air Lines, and both gave specific instructions to the staff regarding how to properly handle their wheelchairs. As Scalesse told USA Today, this is always the worst part of air travel for a wheelchair user. After all, it’s difficult to relinquish your chair to total strangers who mightn’t fully grasp its importance.
Her friend’s chair was damaged by the airline
Sadly, though, when the women touched down in Phoenix and deFiebre was helped into her chair again, she immediately knew it had been damaged. The backrest was folded in an unusual manner and, worst of all, one of its wheels had been warped.
In fact, the wheel was so misshapen that it made the chair impossible to move. DeFiebre couldn’t hold back her emotion: she’d broken down in front of the employees as she pleaded with them to understand that her chair was her life.
Getting it all on video
DeFiebre revealed, “It was scary for me. It is kind of mind-blowing to me that non-disabled people just get to get off a plane and go on their vacation and they don’t have to have that 20-minute anxiety of, ‘What is my wheelchair? What are my… legs going to look like when I get off this plane?’”
Scalesse didn’t idly watch her friend burst into hysterics, though: she began filming the entire scene on her phone to show the world what can happen to disabled people when they travel.
A temporary fix was found — but it wasn’t ideal
Delta staff told deFiebre that, unfortunately, her wheel couldn’t be fixed for four days. Luckily, friends in Phoenix offered manual wheels to use on her trip, but these weren’t ideal. You see, DeFiebre told HuffPost that the wheels on her chair are specifically catered to her needs.
She revealed, “They are higher-tech power-assist wheels. They have a little motor in them that helps me self-propel. As a quadriplegic with limited hand function on one side and no hand function on the other side, I require these wheels to get around.”
Finding joy in a world that wasn’t built for you
Thankfully, the young women were still able to have a great time in Phoenix as they “rolled around the city” together. Scalesse revealed, “It was our first trip without an able-bodied person with us. It was just a bunch of girls in wheelchairs, and we had the best time.”
DeFiebre added, “Pain and struggle is what you saw in that video, but it's not our entire lives. We experience hardships because the world wasn't built for us, but we make the best out of it. We find joy.”
Millions of people see Scalesse’s message
Amazingly, Scalesse’s TikTok clip was viewed 14 million times, and it truly did bring the plight of disabled travelers to the masses. DeFiebre insisted, “I don't want this to happen to any more people, I felt mortified and so sad to see my wheel damaged.”
She added, “None of the able-bodied staff understood that fully — how could they? So, now even when people stop watching that video, I want them to hear about how this is happening to wheelchair-users.”
Lightning strikes twice
Fast-forward to July 4, 2021, and Scalesse took another Delta flight home to New York City after attending a wedding in Minneapolis. When her partner carried her off the plane to her wheelchair, though, she got a sinking feeling in her gut. It had happened again.
She looked at the chair and instantly knew something wasn’t right, later telling Today, “One of the front caster wheels was not touching the ground like all the other wheels and when I went to roll it, it wasn’t touching the ground or rolling.”
Scalesse is told to go see the manager
Upon closer inspection, Scalesse noticed that the back wheel had moved and was now pressing against the brake, which made the chair almost impossible to roll. By this point, she was certain that her chair had been damaged during the flight.
She revealed, “A Delta employee came to meet us on the jet bridge, saw the problem and said if we could get down to the baggage service area, his manager could meet us there and discuss how to go about fixing the problem or replacing my chair.”
Scootaround gets involved
Scalesse was somehow able to get herself to baggage claim, despite it being incredibly difficult to maneuver with a broken wheelchair. She told Today, “When I reached baggage services I showed the manager my unmoving wheel.”
A solution was quickly offered. Scalesse revealed, “The manager told me he could give me the number for Scootaround, the wheelchair rental company Delta works with when wheelchairs are broken during flights.”
No quick solutions
Given that she had flown on July 4, though, Scalesse didn’t hold out much hope of her problem being rectified quickly. Unfortunately, her suspicions were proved correct: when she spoke to someone at Scootaround, they told her that it wouldn’t be easy to help her because the dimensions of her wheelchair were so unusual.
Scalesse then tried to explain to the representative why her chair was so personally customized, hoping that this would spur the company into trying harder to help her out of a tight spot.
Explaining why her chair is so vital
“I explained that I wouldn’t know what to do with a wheelchair that didn’t meet those needs,” explained Scalesse, adding, “As my job as a model, my career and income, and living in New York City heavily involves my chair being very lightweight and fit to my body.”
Yet her tale made little difference to the outcome of the conversation. She related, “The Scootaround representative then told me a custom chair like mine would take a long time to replace, and having a rental would be the best option.”
Scalesse didn’t feel the airline quite “got” it
Scalesse began to cry, as the Delta manager apologized profusely and offered to comp her cab ride home. When she got home, she was contacted by Delta and told that its team would assess the damage to her chair after the holiday weekend.
If it was unfixable, the airline would pay for a replacement and supply her with a rental to use on a temporary basis. Still, while Delta was doing what it could to rectify the situation, Scalesse couldn’t help feeling that the airline didn’t fully appreciate the situation.
“My wheelchair is my freedom”
“I’ve spoken with the head manager of Delta at Newark airport and shared my feelings that going to baggage services for something that is equivalent to my legs and essentially a part of my body felt wrong,” revealed Scalesse.
“My wheelchair is my freedom. It is so difficult for me to understand why wheelchairs are stored with baggage. There needs to be a solution that treats wheelchairs as an extension of our bodies.”
How could the same thing happen twice?
The ordeal Scalesse was enduring was remarkably similar to the chain of events experienced by deFiebre. She observed, “What felt so surreal about this situation is that I was with my best friend GG less than two months ago,” and her chair had also wound up “completely distorted, broken and unusable.”
She added, “We were so lucky that our community — the disability community — showed an outpouring of support and someone with a spare set of the exact same wheels lent GG her wheels.”
“Today I’m losing my independence”
Taking her cues from deFiebre’s ordeal, Scalesse once again uploaded a video to TikTok telling the world about what had happened. The clip — entitled, “Today I’m losing my independence only six weeks after my best friend lost hers. How. How. How” — quickly went viral and received half a million likes.
Scalesse’s utter disbelief that the same thing could have happened to her such a short time after it had also happened to deFiebre radiated strongly throughout the clip. And her followers were equally as stunned.
“You never believe it will happen to you”
Scalesse was the recipient of a similar wellspring of support from her community, but she still couldn’t help feeling shocked that it had come to that. In essence, although she had first-hand experience through deFiebre, she still never quite believed it would happen to her.
In the clip, she muses, “Even though I’ve seen many posts on social media about chairs being broken by airlines and I watched it happen to my best friend, I was shocked to see my chair broken. I can’t comprehend how this can keep happening with no changes.”
A “partner in movement”
The entire situation reinforced to Scalesse that the world still isn’t as accessible to the disability community as it could be, and often disabled people aren’t treated the same way as an able-bodied person.
She said, “We want to travel, to see the world, to go to weddings, to visit family and friends. We have jobs, relationships, hobbies. Our wheelchairs are our freedom. I am not bound to my wheelchair — my wheelchair is my partner in movement.”
“An extremely proud disabled woman”
Scalesse ended with a call for wheelchair-users everywhere to change how the world viewed their “movement partners.” She highlighted how her own attitude to her disability had shifted over the years, and this manifested in the almost symbiotic way she views her chair.
She passionately revealed, “I named my wheelchair Aphrodite after the goddess of love to symbolize how important she is to me and how far I’ve come from being ashamed of being disabled to being an extremely proud disabled woman.”
Delta’s response
In response to Scalesse, Delta issued a statement to Today which sought to address the incident. It read, “We consider a wheelchair as an extension of a person and understand that any mishandling of this mobility device directly impacts their daily living.”
It continued, “We are affirmatively working with the customer to understand what occurred. We are proactively working with our advisory board on disability and our cross-divisional operations teams to continuously improve the travel experience for our customers with disabilities.”
A loss of me
In the end, Scalesse did need a replacement chair, and she named it “Onyx.” She admitted to Fashion magazine that it had taken her six long weeks to become accustomed to the new chair, though — and she missed Aphrodite in a profound way.
She revealed, “I knew I had a connection to Aphrodite, but when she was broken beyond repair, I realized how deep that connection was. It was like this loss of my body — and a loss of me in many ways.”
Becoming a disability advocate
This upsetting experience, coupled with deFiebre’s equally terrible one, contributed to Scalesse seizing the opportunity to boost awareness of disability issues online. She told August, “We had more friends throughout the year have their chairs broken.”
She even claimed, “A really incredible disability advocate passed away last year because of her chair being broken. So, that's become a really big focus for me and advocacy — the way that airlines treat wheelchairs and mobility devices in general.”
Scalesse’s relationship to the word “disability”
When Scalesse spoke to August, she was asked how she feels when she hears the word she’s been labeled with since she was six years old: “disability.” She replied, “I think it's so, so, so complex, and I’ve had a lot of brands and able-bodied people in general ask me, ‘What is the proper term?’”
An answer wasn’t easy to come by, though, because Scalesse believes it’s an incredibly nuanced topic. She reasoned, “It’s such an individual choice and each person identifies in a different way and with a different term.”
She prefers the term “disabled”
“I would say most people that I’m close to in the disability community prefer ‘disabled’ because we feel like ‘disabled’ is a powerful term,” explained Scalesse. Still, this doesn’t mean the world at large feels the same.
Scalesse theorized, “I think a lot of able-bodied people are really uncomfortable with the term ‘disability’ because they're uncomfortable with disability [as a whole] — but we don't look at it as a bad word, we look at it as a word that kind of embodies us.”
“We’re not able bodied and that’s okay”
Scalesse maintained, “We’re not able bodied and that’s okay. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a beautiful thing. So, I really resonate with the word ‘disabled’ now.” The model freely admitted it had been a lifelong journey to reach this point, though.
As we mentioned earlier, she used to reject her disability as a mixed-up teen. She explained, “In that period growing up where I felt so bad about my body, I hated that word, and I didn't want to be a part of my community.”
She now feels “liberated”
“Now I’m probably too proud of it,” laughed Scalesse. “It’s, like, my biggest identity marker! I am so deeply proud to be disabled, but it’s just like this liberation that I didn't have growing up.”
For Scalesse, the thing which opened her up to being proud of her body — disability and all — was finding others in a similar situation. She explained, “It really wasn't until I found my community… that I started to love myself because I could only see beauty in these women.”
Pinpointing the shift in her thinking
The disability advocate revealed, “I was like, ‘They are so beautiful. Their disabled bodies are so beautiful. Everything that they're insecure about to themselves is so beautiful and powerful. So, why can't I see that in me?’”
Yes, one simple question truly altered Scalesse’s thinking: “Why am I unable to love myself like I love my peers?” She explained, “That’s when the shift really, really happened for me, because I was like — I can’t be giving them so much love and not give that to myself.”
She wants to share her story
As for the future, Scalesse has been working on something since 2020 that she one day hopes to bring to the world. As part of her non-fiction writing degree at Columbia, she began work on a memoir, and she’d love to see it on bookshelves one day.
She told Fashion, “I want to show the immense intricacies of being a disabled woman in the world. I just want people to see the nitty-gritty of it, because I think sharing my story will help further my message about my community.”