Content Warning: This article touches on the topic of miscarriage which may be triggering for some readers.
Carol Taylor was studying law when she found herself facing a problem that even the finest legal mind would be unable to argue their way out of: A wealthy friend had invited her to “a very posh ball” and she had nothing to wear.
“He lived in a beautiful mansion in Bellevue Hill, one of the most prestigious areas of Sydney. I wanted to hold my own and look glamorous. I didn’t want to let my friend down,” she says.
But she knew all the other guests would be buying their gowns from frightfully expensive boutiques where prices were upwards of $3000, and she was just a student.
Fortunately, Carol had a plan.
“I went to a city fabric store and bought some crushed velvet and a pattern. I bought organza to make the sleeves see-through, satin binding and some diamantes to add some bling.”
She took everything home, spread it all out on the floor of her apartment and tried to remember what the nuns had taught her in home economics class.
“Back then there was no YouTube. I was trying to remember all the ins and outs. I remember getting really frustrated with it.”
By the end of the week, she had created an old Hollywood-inspired crushed velvet gown with a sweet-heart neckline, organza sleeves and diamante accents.
“When I entered the room, my friend’s mum said, ‘Wow, your dress is amazing.’ I certainly felt that I held my own. I couldn’t believe that less than a week prior I hadn’t had anything. It ended up looking very beautiful, as long as you didn’t look on the inside,” she laughs.
After the ball, Carol enrolled in a Saturday TAFE course to learn a few more sewing skills. It was a decision that would one day change her life.
Fashion designer Carol and her family.
(Image: Alana Landsberry)Carol grew up in rural Ireland in the southern counties of Limerick and Cork and from a young age she loved fashion.
She adored paper doll books and would dress the paper models in “a kaleidoscope of colourful outfits”.
When picking clothes for herself, colour was a must. Her early style icons were her mother and aunt.
“I have a favourite photo of my mum from the ’70s totally rockin’ a pair of purple suede hotpants! My mum was always very glamorous,” Carol says.
Later, she was influenced by whoever was on Top of the Pops: Annie Lennox, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Duran Duran.
Her family moved to Sydney and Bondi Junction became a favourite haunt.
“Both my mum and her sister absolutely loved fashion. As a result, my cousin and I knew every inch of Bondi Junction shopping precinct backwards!”
When it came time to choose a university course, Carol briefly considered doing an arts elective, but she had always been an academic child and so she focused on law.
She graduated in 1993, and says she was disheartened by the inequality she encountered.
“I recall initially only earning $15 a week more than my secretary. This inequity just made me work harder to prove my worth. Unfortunately, I encountered a great deal of sexism in the profession at the time,” she says.
Carol had a love of fashion from a very young age.
(Image: Alana Landsberry)She found a role model in a very accomplished senior lawyer and worked hard to become a senior associate in her practice.
There were challenges, but one thing that would always bring a smile to her face was lunchtime shopping in Martin Place. She loved picking out an elegant slip, stepping into the changing room, “feeling the drop of the dress” as she tried it on, then taking it home in a crisp cardboard bag.
Carla Zampatti was a favourite, but she couldn’t resist the riotous swirls of a colourful Camilla design.
Few things gave her more pleasure than clipping to court in high heels and an elegant suit. Stilettos were her passion, along with migration law.
“I helped many people and I like to think I had a hand in changing their lives. Especially the refugees I represented,” she says.
One day, after a successful appeal before the Refugee Review Tribunal, Carol’s secretary introduced her to a man named Robert.
He was wonderful. Kind. Smart. Clever. Soon she was spending her lunch breaks searching Sydney’s bridal boutiques for a wedding dress.
In her towering heels she ran all over the Pitt Street Mall and the QVB building.
“I ended up buying the very first dress that I saw. For a girl who loved a lot of bling, it was quite simple,” she says.
Carol and Robert were married in 1998, and Carol’s happiness was complete. She had the job, she had the man and she had the shoes. Soon, she hoped, she would be blessed with children.
Things changed drastically early one winter morning when Carol and Robert were driving back from a weekend away and hit some black ice.
The car rolled. The roof caved in. Rob was able to flag down a truck. Carol was badly injured. She recalls lying amid the wreckage and seeing a helicopter land on the road.
“I was strangely calm and focused solely on one goal: Would I still be able to have a child?”
She was rushed to hospital, where she would stay for the next year.
She’d understood immediately that she would never walk again but was dismayed to discover she’d lost movement in her hands and arms as well.
After two months she finally recovered the ability to speak. The first thing she asked was whether she would be able to have children.
“It was such a sad story,” she says. “There was nothing to look forward to. No baby …” She trails off. She was bereft, and asked Robert for a divorce.
“Robert adamantly refused my request,” Carol says.
On the first day she was placed in a wheelchair, he took her down to the hospital courtyard cafe.
“I heard the music from our wedding day playing over the hospital speakers. I turned the corner to see my mum, dad, an altar and a priest, with Robert on bended knee. We renewed our wedding vows.”
Returning home was hard.
Carol recalls coming through the door and seeing sunbeams hit their polished floorboards, lighting up dozens and dozens of small circular marks scattered all over the floor like confetti.
They were indentations she had stamped into the wood with the heels of her stilettos as she strode purposefully around her home. In that moment it hit Carol that she would never again totter around from place to place in her beloved shoes.
Her life was irrevocably altered and the realisation that she would never again slip her feet into a pair of leather stilettos was devastating.
Not only did Carol have to re-learn basic skills, but the way the world saw her had changed as well.
Carol recalls one particularly bruising experience when she and Robert went out to lunch and the waitress asked Robert what Carol would like to eat. Carol was livid.
“I could practise law in the High Court of Australia, but I couldn’t order lunch!” she fumed.
“After my injury, I spiralled into a deep depression and suffered acute PTSD. I had so many lessons to learn as a person with disability, one of which being that I was now excluded from mainstream fashion. This only served to exacerbate my symptoms,” Carol says.
“I remember not even wanting to brush my hair. We had this beautiful bay window in Sydney, and I looked out of it just feeling lost.”
But bit by bit, she began to adjust.
“You have to create a new normal and you do it one day at a time,” she says.
One day she was looking out their bay window and she decided she wanted to put her hair in a ponytail. A month later she was ready for moisturiser.
Rob helped by adapting devices. He melted plastic so it could be moulded into shapes that Carol could grab hold of.
“He made a handle so I can brush my own hair. He’s a MacGyver,” she says.
Carol describes Rob as a MacGyver, who always helped by adapting devices for her.
(Image: Alana Landsberry)Always searching for ways to help, Robert arrived home one afternoon with a fistful of art class enrolment forms and paint brushes. It was a good idea, but it got off to a disastrous start.
“At the end of my very first art class the instructor spoke to my husband and suggested that it might be best if I was to look at some form of abstract art where I could learn to throw paint at the canvas! I will never forget this moment, I felt like his child!”
Carol was determined to prove the instructor wrong.
The next day she and Robert went to the local library and got out as many DVDs and books as they could so Carol could teach herself to paint. She applied herself and practised every single week for years.
“Through sheer determination and the kindness of others I fell in love with the translucency of watercolour,” Carol says. “Art for me has become a form of therapy. My yoga. When painting, my mind is suspended. Time stops. I forget I am disabled. Art has opened and continues to open so many doors for me. Most of all it has given me the confidence I need to wheel through them.”
Carol was determined, even teaching herself how to paint.
(Image: Alana Landsberry)But rediscovering her spark was not the only challenge Carol faced.
Above all, she wanted to be a mother, and as she was teaching herself to paint, she was also dealing with the challenges of trying to conceive.
“My dream of being a mum kept me going. I would not give up. Both Rob and I came from large families and having children was very important to us,” Carol writes in We’ve Got This, a book about parenting with a disability.
Using IVF, Carol and Rob underwent 15 embryo transfers, but they suffered one heartbreaking miscarriage after another.
“I could get pregnant but could not stay pregnant. It was a horrendously difficult time,” Carol writes.
In 2005 they moved to a beautiful property in Queensland.
“The last miscarriage occurred in November 2005,” she says now, “after we moved to Queensland. Robert took me away for the weekend to help me come to terms with the repeated losses, but you can’t run away from that sort of problem. It follows you no matter where you go. He booked us into this lovely little B&B on the Sunshine Coast and on the first morning there I woke to find my milk had come in. It was so surreal to wake up covered in breastmilk but have no baby to feed. It was devastating for us both.”
Carol and support worker Kirja Purcell.
(Image: Alana Landsberry)Little did they know, fate had another twist in store for them.
Just three months after her last miscarriage Carol became pregnant naturally.
“We both just cried: that was the first time we’d ever achieved pregnancy without the assistance of doctors, petri dishes and test tubes.”
The pregnancy was challenging.
Carol had to reduce her medication and it was hard for her to allow herself to feel hopeful, having endured so many losses. There were magical moments, however.
“I could feel our beautiful baby move. Knowing my baby was alive and moving inside me gave me such tremendous joy.”
The birth was “a big production” but to Carol and Robert’s delight, their son, D’arcy, was born safe and well.
Bringing home a new baby for the first time is stressful for anyone and Carol was fraught with worry.
Yet, her little family unit found their way through.
Robert adapted equipment that allowed Carol to feed D’arcy. There wasn’t much available in mainstream baby stores, but they found a group of volunteers called TADQ (Technical Aid for the Disabled Queensland) who helped with a cot set-up.
“When D’arcy was a little older,” she explains, “I could carry him on my tray to the cot. Waking my smiling, bright-eyed little boy each morning and having him be able to crawl onto my lap from his cot was the greatest joy.”
Learning to adapt the world to suit their needs was a big theme in Carol, Robert and D’arcy’s lives.
About four years after she sustained her injury, Carol had started making her own adapted clothing.
“The first piece I designed was a classic black and white evening gown to wear to my cousin’s wedding,” she says.
Creating beautiful garments for herself was fulfilling, but it was also practical.
Carol’s needs are so complex that she has to take many things into consideration when selecting what to wear. She has her skin checked twice daily for pressure sores and something as simple as a seam on a pair of pants can cause problems.
“I eliminated this risk because I designed my own pants and there is no seam. It’s enabled me to work, it’s enabled me to thrive,” she says.
In 2018, one of Carol’s paintings won the Access Arts Achievement Award.
It was an incredible vote of confidence and Carol decided she wanted to put her artwork on fabric and create gorgeous clothing for other people with disabilities.
“I have a sewing machine that has a button that I can hit with my knuckle. I love my sewing machine, but I can’t cut. I need someone to be my hands,” she says.
With business partner Jessie Sadler, Carol now co-owns and co-designs for the first Australian adaptive label with a person with a disability in a leadership role, Christina Stephens.
Carol now co-owns and designs for Australia’s first disability-led adaptive fashion label, Christina Stephens
(Image: Alana Landsberry)In July 2021, The Iconic started stocking their garments and in May of this year Carol Taylor became the first quadriplegic fashion designer to feature in stand-out show at Australian Fashion Week.
Among the items that went down the runway were a three-piece aqua lace lingerie set, vegan pleather pants with side-zippers and a three-piece suit with magnetic side zippers and trim-free pants.
The centrepiece was an evening gown in silk organza, specifically designed to wrap around a woman in a wheelchair.
The dress was modelled by author and advocate Lisa Cox, who glowed with confidence and pride.
This is what Carol wants to be able to do for people with disabilities.
“Clothing goes beyond the mere function of covering our naked bits or keeping us warm. Clothing affects one’s confidence, self-esteem, right to self-expression,” Carol says.
“Clothing goes to our core sense of identity. More importantly, clothing has a direct impact on the way the world perceives you.
“My ultimate endgame is for adaptive fashion to be part of mainstream fashion, so that people can go shopping, feel the clothing, try it on. Why not? Shopping is more than just going and buying a functional garment. It’s meeting up with your friends. It’s retail therapy.”
At the end of the show, Carol wheeled down the runway to uproarious applause.
Advocates, influencers, friends and buyers leapt to their feet in recognition of what she had achieved.
It was a moment Carol will never forget. She was in tears as the standing ovation washed over her.
“After my injury, I believed my career was at an end,” she says with a hint of triumph. “I truly believed the only job I was capable of getting was that of a doorstop! To see my dreams realised in this way was utterly overwhelming. I knew immediately that we were witnessing a revolution!”
If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, help is always available. You can call the SANDS 24/7 bereavement support line on 1300 308 307 or visit the website.
You can read this story and many others in the October issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly – on sale now
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