Dream Dresses

Dream Dresses is a short story collection about women's dreams and the dresses they choose to express them. Covering the life span of women from childhood to old age, these stories explore how the fabric of women's dreams and aspirations become so entangled with attire that the dress and the dream become one and the same.

These are not just fantasies about an "Academy Award Dress" or a designer wedding gown, but the vulnerable dreams of a young girl forced to wear a drab school uniform, the desperate postpartum struggle of a trophy wife to "get her body back," and the "little black dress" that an octogenarian wishes to wear at her funeral.

Dream Dresses goes beyond fashion predation and the Cinderella syndrome. These original, creative stories lay bare the deep, unique interpenetration of wardrobe and wishes, of dreams, desires, and the clothing that clings to them.

Hilary (Cunningham) Scharper is a cultural anthropologist and writer. She received her doctorate from Yale University in anthropology and currently teaches at the University of Toronto. In her academic work, she has explored land values, landscape, human territoriality and environmental politics. For her ethnography of the U.S. Sanctuary Movement, she received a Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award. As an anthropologist, she brings a keen sense of the "everyday" world of "ordinary" people into her creative work. In Dream Dresses she explores the social, cultural and imaginative worlds of women in poignant stories that probe the "hidden transcripts" of howthe dress and dressing come to be linked with desire and hope.