How designer Haley Schwartz channeled her experiences with chronic illness into a brand that balances fashion and function

At 11, as Haley Schwartz was going into middle school, she was diagnosed with dysautonomia, a term for several autonomic nervous system disorders, including postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS). 

“At the time, in 2011, no one knew what POTS or dysautonomia was,” Schwartz says over a Zoom call from her apartment. 

Originally from the Chicago area, she’s been living in New York City since attending the Fashion Institute of Technology. “My teachers looked at me, and I was thin and young and a girl, and they were like, ‘Oh, she’s just anxious.’ They kind of treated me like everything that was happening was my fault.” Schwartz began wearing oversized clothing to conceal her body and the heart monitor she’d worn since she was 4, when she was diagnosed with ventricular tachycardia. “It was an interesting experience for me to have something that I felt very self-conscious about, because in every other aspect of my life, I was so confident.” She describes herself as someone who has always marched to the beat of her own drum, usually unfazed by external judgments. 

“The nurses, and most of my teachers, were horrible to me,” Schwartz recalls. “I would pass out, and they would yell at me to get up and stop being dramatic. It created such a horrible experience of going to school; I felt like I was in hell. I remember feeling depressed and anxious, like ‘I don’t know how I’m going to keep going. Nobody’s taking my experiences seriously. How am I going to get up every single day feeling like this?’” Luckily, she says, she had a great team of doctors as well as supportive parents who continuously advocated for her at school. 

Eventually, a friend asked Schwartz why, despite having a great sense of style, she looked like she had just rolled out of bed. “And I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to dress up for school tomorrow.’ I got up in the morning, and for the first time in so long, I just felt so confident.” Putting together a fun outfit, doing her hair, and applying makeup turned the time once filled with dread into something enjoyable and empowering. 

This transformation wasn’t just internal; Schwartz realized that people were treating her with respect and listening more to what she had to say. This difference didn’t only occur in the classroom: “One time, I had to dress up before an appointment with a new doctor because I had something afterwards, and they just took everything seriously,” she says. “It became a superstition for me. I have to dress up and do my makeup for every appointment now.”

It’s not just patients who acknowledge these unconscious biases. A few years ago, Schwartz’s cardiologist invited her to speak at a medical conference. “I was talking about how the way that I dressed affected the way that people treated me,” she recalls. “I remember this one doctor said that she realized that she subconsciously treated people better who put more effort into themselves. She felt like they cared more about their care and their health.”

“I think people underestimate how our appearance affects the way we’re treated. People always say, ‘Looks don’t matter,’ and they shouldn’t. But they do.”

By the time she was 8, she had decided she would become a fashion designer. “My grandma would sew,” she says. “So I had asked her to teach me, and I started making Halloween costumes and stuff like that.” This childhood dream would finally become reality; In September of 2022, Schwartz, then a 22-year-old student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, took home the school’s first-ever PETE Prize for Entrepreneurs, a juried competition designed to recognize “excellence in developing fresh, insightful, and creative ideas that demonstrate design-oriented and innovative thinking.”

Upon receiving the prize, Schwartz was granted office space, professional guidance, and $30,000 in seed money to develop her new business, an adaptive clothing brand called Vertige, the French word for vertigo. 

When Schwartz started at FIT, she had wanted to be a sportswear designer, but her vision of the future changed when she discovered adaptive design. “It was kind of by accident how I stumbled into it,” she recalls. “I don’t even remember how I learned about what adaptive clothing was; I just remember hearing about it.” Once she became familiar with the concept, “I started asking my professors, like, ‘Hey, for this project, we’re making a jacket. Can I make an adaptive jacket?’” she says. “I always knew I wanted to use fashion in a positive way, but I didn’t really know how.” 

Making an adaptive garment was an enlightening experience.“Normally when you’re designing, you’re kind of designing whatever comes to you,” she says. “But I had to be more intentional because when you’re designing adaptive clothes, everything affects everything. It was a bit challenging trying to figure out, ‘Why am I adding this? Do I just want to add it randomly, because it looks cool, or because it’s going to add value to the jacket?’ It was kind of hard to edit.” 

Without guidance on the intricacies of accessible features, Schwartz had to act with intention, drawing upon her own experiences when making design decisions. For her first adaptive garment, which she calls her “heart jacket,” she asked herself what would’ve been helpful when she had to wear a heart monitor. Schwartz settled on zippers on the front and sleeves of the garment to help with temperature regulation, hidden openings for easy access to heart monitors, and interior pockets to discreetly hold medical devices. The design required a careful balance of meeting medical needs without sacrificing style.

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For many people living with chronic conditions, keeping up appearances can be a challenging task. Even “invisible illnesses” manifest through symptoms like weight fluctuations, swelling, and chronic pain. 

“I’m embarrassed to be seen, really,” Deborah Beebe, a 63-year-old woman with Crohn’s disease. “So I try to wear baggier clothes so my body doesn’t show as much. I had this guy at Wegmans once scream at me and call me an ‘anorexic bitch’ because I took a parking spot he wanted.” 

Oversized clothing aids in concealing the PICC line on Beebe’s chest, a flexible tube that is inserted into a vein for long-term intravenous delivery of fluids and medicine. It also protects her sensitive stomach: “If you touch the right corner of my stomach, I’ll yell out because it hurts so much. So I have to be conscious of that when I’m getting dressed, and I can’t have anything too tight across my stomach.”

In her designs for Vertige, Schwartz includes adjustable waists and elastic backs to reduce pressure on the stomach, as well as hidden cord-keepers, to help customers like Beebe to feel more secure without having to hide behind baggy clothing. Keeping in mind the importance of adaptivity, Schwartz also centers this idea that appearances can affect not only self-perception but also how others perceive and treat you.

Schwartz models the Vertige adjustable bootcut pants

Schwartz’s design process has evolved since that first heart jacket she created for a midterm at FIT. “If I go into design just thinking about the adaptive features every single time, it feels more restrictive, and I don’t feel like the creative, fashionable aspect of it is playing as much of a role as I want it to,” Schwartz explains. “So now I go fashion-first, and try not to worry about the adaptive features, and then see how I can change it.” This helps the designer ensure that the fashionable aspects of her designs are given as much attention as the adaptive and functional features.

When approaching a new Vertige design, Schwartz first focuses on the intended “vibe” and aesthetic characteristics. Then she creates a series of sketches, chooses a few favorites, and begins focusing on how she can adapt the designs to incorporate functional, adaptive features. 

To Schwartz, the dual mission of adaptive fashion is all too overlooked in the fashion world, where chronic conditions are treated as a temporary problem requiring a temporary solution: “As adaptive fashion moves forward, I’m hoping more people will care,” she says. “But it’s frustrating. Everything is very functional, and a lot of times, chronic illness and disability are very long-term. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, I just got surgery, and I need to wear this shirt for a few weeks.’ It’s going to be there for a while.”

The limited selection of function-first accessible fashion is a frustration for many people living with chronic conditions. Like Schwartz, 21-year-old Parsons School of Design student Sophia Lester found inspiration in her experience living with rheumatoid arthritis for an Integrated Studio class. The assignment required students to design something that would help members of a community they identified with, so Lester endeavored to create trousers that were easy to put on and could adjust for swollen joints during arthritic flare-ups. During her research process, she was shocked by the lack of options: 

“For lack of better words, the market just kind of sucked,” she says. “A lot of it looked like scrubs or pajamas. It wasn’t something I would want to leave the house in. And I have an internship. I work a job. Even if I could wear that in my normal life and be happy with it, in the professional world I never could.” With that insight, Lester decided to design a pair of officewear pants in an attempt to fulfill an unmet need.

Hope Tourtillot, a 21-year-old interior design student living with POTS, expresses frustration with how compression socks, which reduce the risk of fainting, have constrained her style. She often avoids wearing them, opting instead to carry items like salt packets and portable fans to manage her symptoms. Still, sometimes she has no choice: “When I was working as a cashier in my senior year of high school, we were not allowed to sit down at all,” Tourtillot says. “It got to be summertime, and it was really, really hot. So to make that job functional, I had to wear compression socks, or I would be super lightheaded.”

Despite their functionality, Tourtillot dreaded wearing compression socks, which often feature bold patterns and bright colors that clashed with both her personal style and her work uniform. “You can find black pairs, but they’re still odd-looking, especially the knee-high ones that work the best for me,” she says. “I don’t really wear shorts anymore. I always have to wear pants if I’m wearing them.” For people with POTS, high temperatures can exacerbate symptoms by elevating heart rate and causing dehydration. For Tourtillot, concealing her compression socks under pants means increasing the risk of fainting.

A few of the adaptive features in Schwartz’s designs for Vertige

With her designs for Vertige Adaptive, Schwartz tries to provide solutions so that chronically ill people don’t feel like they have to choose between their health and self-expression. At the same time, she sees stories like Lester’s and Tourtillot’s as reflective of a larger industry problem, rooted in misconceptions about the priorities of people living with chronic conditions. “It’s like they think that people with disabilities or chronic illnesses don’t care about how they look,” she says, “Or they don’t see that it has such a big effect on you when you can put something on that feels good.”

“I talked to someone pretty high up in the industry, and they actually discouraged me in the beginning from starting my brand,” Schwartz says. She was told that, because there were already brands making adaptive clothing, her concept lacked novelty. “I was like, ‘But you have a million options to choose from.’ As someone with a disability, even if two other brands are hypothetically doing the same thing as me, I have a different aesthetic, and not everyone likes the same things. I really want there to be unlimited options for people so they have the same choices.” 

Schwartz has also encountered barriers in producing Vertige’s adaptive garments. “One of my biggest challenges in starting the brand was finding a manufacturer who was willing to do adaptive designs,” she says. Manufacturing designs with added adaptive features is both more complicated and more expensive than standard designs. “One of my biggest complaints I get is the price,” Schwartz says of her customer feedback. “Even though I’m charging way less than I probably should be because I want it to be accessible for people. I still need to have enough money to put back into the business. That’s another one of the biggest challenges.”

Schwartz believes that adaptive clothing is for everyone because everyone’s bodies are constantly changing, and stresses the fact that many chronic conditions may not be obvious to onlookers. “My entire goal was to create clothes that anybody could wear, regardless of whether they have a health condition or disability. Not because I need to be inclusive to people who don’t, but because I want people with disabilities to feel like they can wear the same things as everyone else,” she says. “Sometimes there are so many things about your life that feel different. I want to have a brand that someone can go to and have the same options as everyone else.”