Rebecca Le'gon owned good leggings long before she came to us. That part was never the issue. The issue came afterwards, sitting with a pair of scissors, cutting into the fabric around her prosthetic socket because nothing she'd bought was ever built to go around it in the first place. What she was left with looked exactly like what it was, a repair job on an expensive pair of leggings, not a garment made for her body.
That's usually where adaptive clothing conversations stop. A workaround, stitched in after the fact. Rebecca's leggings went somewhere else entirely, and it started on a padel court in Manchester.
Who Rebecca Le'gon Is
Rebecca has spent years on the other side of stories like this one. She's the director and publisher of Viva Lifestyle magazine and Viva London, a title she launched in 2010 covering fashion, lifestyle and events across the region, usually asking the questions rather than answering them.
She's also been an above the knee amputee since she was eighteen months old, fitted with her first prosthetic after being born with a congenital hip condition. She's described herself since as a fitness fanatic, most recently taking up padel, a sport she'd never played until the last couple of years. Finding women's amputee clothing that actually fit, rather than something she had to adapt herself afterwards, was rarely straightforward for her.
How She Found Us
Padel changed that. It's a sport built around sharp, lateral movement and its own particular kit demands, and its adaptations for above the knee amputees are part of what made it accessible to Rebecca in the first place. At the UK Padel Awards in Manchester, she came across us, already known for padel leggings and shorts and for a standing adaptive alterations service built for people with limb loss and other mobility needs.
She didn't go looking for another pair to cut up herself. She came straight to Kate Hill, and asked what a pair built specifically around her prosthetic might actually look like.
Redesigning the Fit From Scratch
Kate didn't take an existing pattern and adjust it. She rebuilt the approach for this customer, working through WhatsApp calls, voice notes, photos and video with Rebecca to understand exactly how the leggings needed to sit and move around her socket, detail no size chart could have told her.
“Instead of expecting someone to adapt to the clothing, I adapted the clothing to the individual,” Kate said afterwards.
That's a different job to altering a hem. It meant working out where the fabric needed to give, where it needed to hold firm, and where a standard waistband would simply be in the way. It's what an adaptive fashion designer does when the brief is one specific body rather than a size range, built through our own bespoke Design Your Own service and the same in-house UK manufacturing process we use across the rest of the range.
The finished pair carried a detail no size chart would think to add either. Rebecca's initials, embroidered onto the leggings. Small, but it's the kind of thing that turns a functional fix into something someone actually wants to wear, rather than adaptive activewear built strictly to a brief and nothing more.
The Result, in Rebecca's Own Words
“As an amputee, I usually have to cut my leggings to fit my prosthetic, often leaving them looking scruffy. Kate worked closely with me to create a perfect fit, no adaptation was too much trouble. Thank you, Kate, for creating sportswear that looks amazing and makes me feel amazing too.”
That's not customer service language. It's someone describing the first time a piece of sportswear did what it was supposed to do without a compromise built into it.
Why It Matters Beyond One Pair of Leggings
Rebecca posted the finished leggings on Instagram, and it didn't stay a private win. Another above the knee amputee, Bee Katyal, saw the post and commissioned her own bespoke pair from Kate not long after. One customer's solution became someone else's proof that the service existed at all.
Why is adaptive clothing important? Not as a marketing line, but as evidence two separate customers have now put in front of us. Most adaptive fashion gets treated as a limited edition, a line added once and rarely revisited. What Rebecca and Bee's leggings show looks a lot more like ongoing demand than charity. Adaptive clothing for women with limb loss isn't a niche request. It's women who've spent years altering their own amputee clothing asking for someone to build the pattern properly the first time, which is a considerably higher bar than most activewear brands currently clear.
Kate's own reasoning for doing this kind of work at all is fairly simple. Every body is different, and every woman deserves clothing that makes her feel confident, comfortable and included, she's said of the approach behind it. For Rebecca, that meant not reaching for scissors before a match. For us, it meant a second commission from someone who'd never have found us any other way.
To read Rebecca’s full review, you can check it out here.
