The Carmen Busquets Parsons Award for Disabled Fashion Students will hand a $12,500 annual grant to a student in the school’s MPS Fashion Management programme, running through the 2027/2028 academic year, with applications opening this autumn. Behind it is Carmen Busquets: Venezuelan-born entrepreneur, co-founder and founding investor of Net-a-Porter in 2000, and someone who has worn hearing aids her entire career.
Busquets has described being drawn to fashion precisely because ‘it’s so visual, so creative’, a field where partial deafness was less a barrier than a redirect. That personal logic is now the rationale for the grant.
What the Carmen Busquets Parsons Award Actually Covers
The grant recipient gains more than the money. They also plug into the Parsons Disabled Fashion Student Program, a four-year initiative built around recruitment, scholarship, and ongoing support, with a particular focus on multiply marginalised disabled students. The programme has been running since 2023, co-created by Parsons Dean of Fashion Dr. Ben Barry and Sinéad Burke, who founded her consultancy Tilting the Lens in 2020 after three years of deliberation over one blunt question: where are the disabled fashion designers and creatives, especially those of multiple intersections?
Tilting the Lens is not a small operation. Its client list runs to Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Netflix, Pinterest, and Starbucks. The programme it co-built at Parsons supports five students each year through mentorship and grants, and is funded in part by The Capri Holdings Corporate Foundation. The Busquets award sits alongside that existing infrastructure rather than replacing it.
It is worth flagging one detail the original announcement undersells: the Parsons Disabled Fashion Student Program is open to students across BFA Fashion Design and MFA Fashion Design & Society, not solely the MPS Fashion Management programme that the Busquets grant targets. The award is a specific pipeline into a broader ecosystem.
Selection for the Busquets grant will be handled by Barry and an elected faculty member during the application process. Barry framed the rationale plainly: ‘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.’
A Foundation Built on Fashion as a Force for Change
The award comes out of the Carmen Busquets Foundation, established in 2025 and devoted to fashion, art, and design as agents of cultural and social change. Its brief spans craftsmanship, sustainability, and support for creatives from underrepresented regions. The Foundation’s first prize was created in partnership with the Latin American Fashion Awards, which spans 14 categories recognising Latin American creatives in design, photography, and artisan craftsmanship, chosen by Busquets for its commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Busquets has been explicit that legacy is her key priority for this period. As Vogue reported, she is selling off pieces from her personal collection spanning emerging designers, sustainable brands, and artisans, with proceeds going to charity rather than letting the collection end up in a landfill. Since co-founding Net-a-Porter, she has backed Farfetch, Cult Beauty, and Lyst, with her investment vehicle absorbing her earlier CoutureLab platform along the way. The Parsons grant is of a different character: it is not a bet on upside, it is a write-off by design.
Steven Kolb, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, offered his own case for why disability representation matters in design education: ‘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.’
Busquets herself put it more bluntly. ‘Fashion does have a responsibility to be more adaptive, more inclusive,’ she said. ‘We have created a world where everything has to be perfect when it comes to fashion, thanks to social media. We are all guilty of it. We have to send the message that it’s OK not to be perfect.’
The first applications open this autumn. Whether the Carmen Busquets Parsons Award grows beyond its current run through 2027/2028 will depend, presumably, on what the recipients do with it.
