The Three Dresses

While combining fiction writing and artistic processes in my creative practice PhD project (2020), I worked with several fairy tales. My short story “The Three Dresses” is written from the point of view of dresses made from snow, darkness, and mirrors. As a first-person narrative, the reader embodies each dress in turn throughout the story, which alludes to “Cinderella” traditions from subtypes ATU510A and ATU501B. The main point of differentiation is in the agency of the dresses as speaking objects and their ability to reveal the relationship between the seamstress who made them and the persecuted young woman who wears them.