Dressed in a plum-colored vintage Versace jacket paired with wide-leg Madewell jeans and bare feet, disability awareness advocate and content creator April Lockhart warmly welcomes me into her light and airy Nashville home. Just beyond the entryway, assorted outfits hang on a rolling rack — tools of the trade for a lifestyle, beauty and fashion expert.
April uses her platform not only to share style, travel and home decorating tips, but also to help normalize disabilities. With an innate fashion sense and serious cred in the beauty industry, April — who was born with amniotic band syndrome, resulting in what she calls a “limb difference” — has found a wide audience, both within the disability community and beyond it.
As of this writing, April’s upbeat videos have gotten 5.6 million likes on TikTok and garnered over 300,000 followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. She has partnered with more than 200 brands, including Urban Outfitters, Veronica Beard, Madewell, Walmart and Wayfair, and she helped Anthropologie promote its adaptive clothing line. To top it all off, this year, April was featured in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” for her work in social media.
A Drive to Overcome
April, a New Jersey native, developed an inner drive early on — evidenced by her becoming the youngest cheer captain at her high school and learning to proficiently play guitar with a prosthetic.
“I feel like being born with a limb difference or any kind of disability immediately makes you a little bit more resilient,” says April. “You are working so much harder to do anything from a really young age, which now I look at as one of the best characteristics that I could have developed — resilience and hard work, always having to overcome.”
She moved to Nashville in high school to live with her dad, a songwriter, and pursue music. At 18, after a semester at Belmont University, the casting directors for the ABC musical reality TV show Rising Star reached out. By then, April already had another goal in her sights — attending the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
“[The show] started at the beginning of summer,” says April, explaining that she’d planned to start school in the fall, when the show would already be over. “So I was like, if nothing else, this will be a really fun summer camp that I can look back on, and we’ll see where it goes. I made it to the top eight, which was pretty cool.”
Owning Her Story — and Her Style
After graduating from FIT in 2017, April worked in marketing and social media at cosmetic companies Caudalie and ILIA. While at ILIA, she also began building her own brand.
“I finally started getting some of my first collaborations, and I thought it was the coolest thing,” says April. “The first was like $500 [from Urban Outfitters]. I thought it was the best thing ever. I got a box of free clothes plus $500. I was like, it can’t get better.”
But April says she was “still very much hiding” when it came to her disability. “I genuinely don’t think people who followed me had any idea that I had one hand,” she says. “Maybe once a year I would mention it somehow. So how, all of a sudden, do you unveil this?”
The answer came in the form of a social media series April introduced in 2022 called “Normalizing Disabled Fashun Girlies,” which connected her with others in the disabled community. “Dear April…” came next, with followers sharing their stories. April also began hearing from followers outside the disability community. One mother wrote to say she showed the videos to her young daughter to explain limb differences in a positive way.
By the spring of 2023, April was making four times her salary as a content creator, so she left her job to branch out on her own. Later that year, she walked for Victoria’s Secret at the Runway of Dreams fashion show during New York Fashion Week, where the lingerie company launched its adaptive line.
Expanding Her Influence
Now with an agent and a full-time assistant, April is busy working on new ideas. She has also started to host more in-person events connecting people in the disabled community.
During our recent interview, April pulled up roughs for her newest project called “Disabled&.” “Think ‘Disabled & Artistic’ or 'Disabled & Athletic,’” she explained, pointing a perfectly manicured red fingernail at her computer screen. The plan is to host in-person events, like dinners and retreats, and share diary-like entries written by her and other community members on Substack — once again, in an effort to destigmatize disabilities.
She sees a book in her future — and maybe even a reality show. April says it could be a sort of Love on the Spectrum-meets-What Not to Wear, featuring fashion, beauty, dating and confidence-building tips.
“If you had asked me even three years ago, would I change being born with one hand or having a limb difference, I probably would have said yes,” says April. “Life would be a lot easier.”
Now? She wouldn’t change a thing. “My biggest insecurity has now become the cornerstone to my life and the cornerstone to my purpose,” she says. “And I think I’m just cracking the surface.”
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