Who we are
Our Story
Love, Emma started with one girl, one conversation, and a belief we've never let go of: no one should be left out of girlhood.
How it started
While working as a fashion stylist in college, our founder, Emma, met a client's sister who had cerebral palsy, and something stuck with her. The fashion industry simply wasn't designing clothing to be accessible for girls with disabilities and chronic illness, and it was shutting them out of something that should belong to every girl: getting dressed up in something that makes her feel beautiful, and walking into a room confident and at her best.
Emma couldn't stop thinking about how many girls were being left out.
At first the answer seemed simple: make beautiful clothing for the girls fashion had overlooked. Then one idea changed how she saw the whole problem.
The idea that changed everything
“Disability itself is not a barrier. The biggest barriers are social, physical, and digital.”
Emma saw Haben Girma speak, and it put everything into focus. The fashion industry wasn't accessible, and the barrier wasn't disability or chronic illness. It was the way clothing was designed, for how it looked instead of for the people wearing it.
So Emma didn't want to make a separate adaptive line, a "special" version for some girls and a regular version for the rest. She wanted to make fashion that was simply accessible, one collection, for every girl.
The curb-cut effect
Think of the curb cut, the little ramp where the sidewalk dips to meet the street. Wheelchair users fought for years to get it built. Now it carries strollers, suitcases, delivery carts, all of us. Nobody planned that part. It's just what happens when something is designed with real care: it turns out better for everyone.
That changed the goal. Emma would make the kind of fashion she'd always loved, designed from the start around the girls fashion usually skips, so that any girl could wear it and love it, with or without a disability or chronic illness.
So she built it
There was no roadmap for what Emma pictured: fashion built from the start to be accessible and inclusive for everyone, not a separate line for some. So she set out to build it herself, from scratch.
She didn't build it alone. It took five years of sitting down with girls from all walks of life, girls who knew exactly what fashion had always missed, and turning what they shared into real pieces through round after round of trial and error. Their voices, along with Emma's own experience with chronic illness, are sewn into every design. The girls this clothing is for are the girls who shaped it.
Designed for all of us
Here's the thing about designing for everyone: you can't start with everyone. So we start with the girls fashion has always left out, and design outward from there.
And the clothing gets better for everyone. A piece designed to stay comfortable seated, with nothing digging or bunching, is better on a girl in her wheelchair and better on her best friend at a desk all day. It's one piece, made for the girl it began with and the girl beside her.
That's what Love, Emma is here to do: make accessible fashion the standard. Because designing for more of us makes fashion better for all of us.
The feeling we're chasing
You know the magic of getting ready with your friends: swapping outfits, passing around the good lip gloss, hyping each other up before you head out the door. Those are the rituals of girlhood, and they belong to all of us.
Love, Emma is that closet. Open to every girl, where everyone gets to feel beautiful.
Every girl deserves to feel beautiful in what she wears. That's the whole story.
