Justin Dougan-LeBlanc Selected for Open Style Lab AI Research Residency

�� Professor Justin Dougan-LeBlanc is one of five fellows selected for Open Style Lab’s 2026 AI Research Residency, which brings together perspectives across disability, fashion, design, research, and technology.

�� Professor Justin Dougan-LeBlanc joins Open Style Lab’s 2026 AI Research Residency, where he explores how AI could expand access to personal style and help designers rethink accessibility in fashion.

School of Fashion Professor Justin Dougan-LeBlanc is examining how artificial intelligence could help make fashion more accessible — without sacrificing the individuality and self-expression that make personal style personal.

Dougan-LeBlanc, a professor in Columbia’s School of Fashion, is one of five fellows selected for ’s 2026 AI Research Residency, an interdisciplinary program exploring the intersections of AI, fashion, and accessibility. Open Style Lab is a nonprofit organization working to make style accessible to people of all abilities through design, research, education, and industry collaboration.

For Dougan-LeBlanc, a Deaf artist, designer, and educator whose work considers how sensory difference shapes movement, identity, and participation, the residency raises a fundamental question: What does access to personal style really mean?

“One question I keep coming back to is the difference between access to clothing and access to personal style,” Dougan-LeBlanc says. “A garment may technically be functional, but that does not necessarily mean it gives someone meaningful choice, confidence, identity, or self-expression.”

Looking Beyond Function

Dougan-LeBlanc’s contribution to the research focuses on the fashion and design side, including personal style access, accessible garment design, inclusive fit, and the barriers that keep accessibility from being incorporated into mainstream fashion from the beginning.

That means looking beyond whether someone can simply wear a garment. Dougan-LeBlanc is examining considerations such as sizing and fit, closures and materials, sensory needs, seated bodies, assistive devices, and even the information provided about clothing.

He is also questioning why accessible fashion continues to be treated as a separate — and often medicalized — category rather than as part of fashion design itself.

“Fashion is such a powerful tool for self-identity, and if AI mishandles how personal style is understood or translated, it could have a real psychological impact on people who do not fit within the traditional ‘standards’ of fashion,” Dougan-LeBlanc says.

Teaching AI to Understand More Than Size

Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for designers, Dougan-LeBlanc sees an opportunity to explore how it could help designers, brands, and consumers make better-informed decisions.

A major part of the research is co-design with the disability community. Through surveys, interviews, lived experience, and interdisciplinary research, the team is exploring what people actually need from inclusive fashion technology, what is currently missing, and what they would want to control.

A useful AI-supported styling or shopping tool, Dougan-LeBlanc says, would need to understand much more about a person than conventional information such as size, color, or price. Movement, sensory preferences, dressing methods, seated fit, assistive devices, and personal style could all influence whether a garment actually works for someone.

But AI systems learn from information that already exists — and that presents another challenge.

Much of the existing imagery surrounding disability and clothing emphasizes medical or functional needs, Dougan-LeBlanc says. If AI systems learn from those representations, they risk reproducing the same assumptions.

The residency also offers an opportunity to address those limitations early.

“To me, this residency is an opportunity to examine those gaps while these systems are still developing, rather than waiting until exclusion becomes even more deeply embedded,” he says.

Designing Accessibility From the Beginning

The residency is still in the research phase, and Dougan-LeBlanc does not want to define its final outcome too early. He hopes the collaborative process — which brings together perspectives across disability, fashion, design, research, and technology — leads to a clearer understanding of what accessible and inclusive fashion technology needs to account for.

But improving AI alone will not solve the problem.

“AI is not the only issue here,” he says. “It is learning from practices, systems, and assumptions that already exist within fashion. If those practices remain exclusionary, AI can simply reproduce them at a larger scale.”

For Dougan-LeBlanc, the larger opportunity is to rethink how designers, retailers, and online platforms approach bodies, movement, sensory experience, identity, and personal style from the outset.

“Accessibility should not limit creativity. I actually see it as an opportunity for innovation,” he says. “Accessibility needs to start at the beginning of the design process, not as an afterthought.”

To follow the research as it develops and learn more about ways to participate in Open Style Lab’s work, at and follow @openstylelab on social media.

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