Runway of Dreams, brain child of fashion designer Mindy Scheier, is a nonprofit organization that works with the fashion industry to adapt mainstream clothing for the disabled community, and is now joining Tommy Hilfiger in a new collection of adaptive clothing that will be available directly to consumers. The 22-piece collection, now on the designer’s website, is available for boys and girls in sizes 4 to 20 and 4 to 18, respectively. Runway of Dreams had taken birth in response to a dilemma personally experienced by Scheier. Scheier was torn when her middle son Oliver came home from school requesting to wear jeans to school the next day, just like his friends do. Seems like an innocuous request, except Oliver was born with a rare form of muscular dystrophy. “It was the first time that I had to really make a choice,” said Scheier. “Do I let him to go to school wearing jeans that he wouldn’t be able to go to the bathroom on his own, wouldn’t be able to wear leg braces? Or do I say, I’m so sorry honey, you can’t dress like the other kids and you can’t wear what they wear?” That proved to be a turning point, the incident spawning the creation of Runway of Dreams. “Adaptive clothing will absolutely be that next department that we are going to see in our stores, in our society, as something that becomes very much a mainstream notion. I won’t stop until it happens,” Scheier declared.
