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'IT SEEMS like an oxymoron,” said Carmel Highlands resident Marilyn Hamilton. “Fashion and wheelchairs — how do those go together?”

Hamilton, who invented a lightweight wheelchair shortly after a hang-gliding accident left her paralyzed from the waist down almost 30 years ago, knows they do.

Next week, during New York’s big Fashion Week, her Quickie wheelchairs will drip with haute couture. Tuesday night, Hamilton and her co-chairs — Wendy Crawford of Miami, Fla., Julia Stockton Dorsett of Boca Raton, Fla., and Ashley Lauren Fisher of Morristown, N.J. — will present a black-tie event to raise money for paralysis research. And to show women who use wheelchairs can be as fashionable as anybody.

“We’re combining glamour, fashion and philanthropy,” said Hamilton, who cofounded the nonprofit Discovery Through Design to raise awareness of disabled women’s health initiatives and spinal cord injury research. “We decided we would go after couture designers in New York and ask them to create a fashion look for a wheelchair.”

They bit. Lloyd Klein, St. John Knits, Zang Toi, Marc Bouwer, Kimora Simmons and others committed to creating “original designer wheelchairs and couture outfits to match.” Hamilton said the gala reflects her motto: “If you can’t stand up, then you should stand out!”

Among the designers is Stephanie Meyer of Stephan Cori in the Crossroads.

“She’s doing a whole line of changeable wheelchair accessory looks — dress up your chair as well as dress yourself — all interchangeable,” Hamilton said. “She’s my designer and is taking a touch of Carmel to New York to compete with the couture designers in New York.”

Attendees of the Feb. 6 gala at Cipriani on 42nd Street, with Leslie Stahl emceeing, will see the designers’ creations in living color on four “roll models” selected in a national search: Jenny Smith, Melissa Holley, Michele Boardman and Rosemarie Rossetti. The four chairwomen, who are paraplegic and quadriplegic, will also receive custom-designed chairs.

“There’s an 80-20 rule that 80 percent of people in wheelchairs are men, and there’s not a lot of attention given to women,” she said. “It seemed time to merge fashion and wheelchairs. We wanted to honor women’s lifestyles and the ability of women getting out in their lives and doing some incredible things.”

She speaks from experience. “In those first days, it was just shocking,” to be disabled, she said. “But it’s amazing how the human spirit steps up with a great attitude and finds a better path.”

A year after her accident, she revolutionized the conventional, cumbersome, 60-pound wheelchair she found lacked “dignity, freedom of mobility, function or fit.”

Using lightweight materials employed in hang-gliders, Hamilton developed the design for the Quickie wheelchair and cofounded Motion Designs Inc. in 1979 with two hang-gliding experts. Sunrise Medical Inc. bought the company in 1986, but Hamilton stayed on as vice president of global strategic planning, “because I am such a great advocate for change.”

She also spent a decade skiing and playing tennis competitively, winning two silver medals in the International Disabled Ski Championships, and becoming six-time National Disabled Ski Champion and twice winner of the U.S. Women’s Open Wheelchair Tennis Championships between 1980 and 1990.

“I don’t ski competitively anymore, but I certainly ski and play tennis as much as I can between my travel and work schedules,” she said last week, a few days before flying to New York for the Rolling With Style show.

In 1991, she founded the nonprofit Winners on Wheels, a coed scouting-type program that helps foster confidence, dedication and hope in children.

Hamilton also received the Business of the Year for the Western U.S. award and the California Business Woman of the Year award. She is a member of the California Governor’s Hall of Fame for People with Disabilities and was given the Minerva Award by California First Lady Maria Shriver last year.

She and her husband, Bob, moved to Carmel Highlands from Fresno, where the Quickie wheelchair’s manufacturing operations are, two years ago. “It’s a little slice of paradise,” she said.

For more information or to make a donation, visit www.discoverythroughdesign.org or send a check to 2037 West Bullard Ave., No. 400, Fresno, CA 93711.