Carmen Busquets has spent her career proving that a perceived limitation can be a source of vision. An entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of the pioneering online retailer Net-a-Porter, Busquets is partially deaf and wears hearing aids, and she has never treated that as something to hide. If anything, she credits it with steering her toward fashion in the first place, a world she was drawn to precisely because it is so visual and so creative.
Now she is turning that experience into opportunity for others. Through her charity foundation, established in 2025, Busquets has partnered with Parsons School of Design to create the Carmen Busquets Award for Disabled Fashion Students, a fund designed to help disabled talent break into an industry that has too often overlooked them.
What the award offers
The award provides an annual grant of 12,500 dollars to a student in the Parsons MPS Fashion Management program, and it is committed to run through the 2027 and 2028 school year. Applications open in the autumn of 2026, and recipients will be chosen by Dr. Ben Barry, the Parsons Dean of Fashion, together with an elected faculty member.
The money is only part of the support. Winners also gain entry to the Parsons Disabled Fashion Student Program, which was launched in 2023 in partnership with Sinead Burke and her accessibility consultancy Tilting the Lens. That program pairs mentorship with grants for five students each year, meaning the new award plugs into an existing structure rather than standing alone.
A perspective the industry needs
For the people behind it, the initiative is about more than tuition. Dr. Ben Barry framed the partnership as a way of recognising a contribution that has long gone uncredited.
Parsons is proud to partner with Carmen on this important scholarship initiative. As a deaf leader in the business of fashion, Carmen is using her platform to bring visibility to the central role disabled people have long played in shaping the industry and to create pathways for the next generation.
Steven Kolb, the president of the CFDA, made the case in practical terms, arguing that designers with disabilities see problems and solutions that others simply cannot.
It's so important to enable design students with disabilities to enter into the industry, they're bringing a perspective that somebody who doesn't have that experience would never know in terms of the design process.
Room to be imperfect
For Busquets, the deeper mission is cultural. Fashion, amplified by the relentless polish of social media, can feel like a machine built to celebrate an impossible ideal, and she wants to loosen its grip. She sees disabled students not as recipients of charity but as designers with something essential to teach the field about adaptability and inclusion.
Fashion does have a responsibility to be more adaptive, more inclusive. We have to send the message that it's OK not to be perfect.
That message, coming from a woman who helped rewrite how the world buys luxury, carries weight. By funding a place for disabled talent inside one of fashion's most influential schools, Busquets is betting that the industry's future will be richer for the voices it has spent too long leaving out, and that the next great designer may be someone the old system would never have let through the door.
