Stylish mobility aids are having a moment. Good.
Kathleen Stock wrote in The Times that young women reaching for walking sticks are driven by anxiety, social contagion and influencers, not medical need, and asked why Gen Z women apparently have "strangely unstable bodies" compared to the generations before them. PoTS UK called the piece sensationalist. A petition against the paper followed. I want to offer a different explanation, one that doesn't require deciding anyone's pain is invented: these aids aren't new, and neither is the need for them. What's changed is that fewer women are hiding it. Women who needed this help all along are done being ashamed of asking for it.
Nothing came from nowhere
Here's what "strangely unstable bodies" actually looks like on the ground: a stigmatised, medical-looking aid gets left in the cupboard on a bad day because using it in public invites exactly the kind of scrutiny Stock's piece just handed out. A well-designed one, something someone's actually chosen and likes the look of, gets used when it's needed. That's not more disability appearing overnight. That's more disabled people no longer being ashamed of what they already needed.
Add to that: genuine improvements in recognising conditions that disproportionately affect young women, chronic illness and joint conditions among them, and better awareness that a mobility aid isn't an all-or-nothing, every-day-forever decision. Some people need one occasionally. Some need one always. Neither is a costume.
Design the aid properly and the stigma does most of the work itself
This is where it connects directly to what I do. When Human Beauty designed Anti-Roll™ packaging into Liquid Confidence™ Mascara, the point wasn't to make an "accessible mascara" that looked like a medical device. It was to make a mascara that happened to work properly for hands that don't grip the standard way, and looked like something anyone would want on their shelf. Nobody has to announce anything to use it. It just works better, for more people, including people who'd never think of themselves as needing "adaptive" anything.
A cane is no different. Make it beautiful, make it a genuine style choice, and using it stops being a disclosure. It becomes an accessory that happens to also help you walk. That's not shallow. That's exactly the shift accessible design is supposed to make: from "special equipment for a special category of person" to "a good product, that also removes a barrier."
You can see the same shift in who's building for this market. Cool Crutches sells interchangeable, printed crutch covers instead of the one grey option people used to be stuck with for life. NeoWalk makes walking frames and rollators designed to look like something you'd choose off a shelf, not something a hospital handed you on your way out. Neither is selling a costume. They're selling the same thing Human Beauty sells: a version of something necessary that someone's actually glad to be seen with.
The actual takeaway
If a mobility aid looking good makes someone use it who was previously too embarrassed to, that's not vanity winning over practicality, and it's not mobility aids becoming a trend. That's shame finally lifting enough for people to use what they always needed, out loud. I'd love to see more of it, in beauty and everywhere else.
