Wearing the same dress every day for six months could get awfully old, awfully fast.
But Amy Seiffert has a powerful motivation that ranges far beyond issues of arrested fashion sense or a
broken washing machine.
The Bowling Green woman is on Day 89 of the quest she began back on Nov. 15, with the ultimate goal of
aiding women trapped in sex trafficking.
Through her personal fashion marathon Seiffert, a 31-year-old artist, campus minister, wife and mother,
is attempting to raise awareness and funds for The Daughter Project, a non-profit operation with the
mission of aiding girls formerly caught up in the sex trade.
Halfway through the six months, she is doggedly holding fast to her plan to wear the same simple gray
T-shirt style dress day in and day out.
"Just this week I’m kind of dragging, but I think I can still rock it through May," she said
Friday, adding that she allows herself a few accessories to change up her look from one day to the next.

Seiffert keeps a blog, http://www.amyseiffert.com/ in which she has posted photos of her "look"
on different days, and commented on the challenge of the six-month pledge.
In her Jan. 15 entry, with two months down and four to go, she was able to insist, "I still like the
actual dress. Gray is cute, versatile and fun right now."
She noted humorously that belts "have been a life saver for this project and quite festive! Never
have I been so
(See DRESS on 5)
thankful for their invention."
But Seiffert noticed the dress had started to get thin in a few spots. "Maybe by the end I will
patch it."
A month later, the garment is another notch worse for wear.
"There’s several holes at the seams."
No wonder. It wasn’t even a new dress when she acquired it.
"I work with CRU (she is co-director of the BGSU Christian student ministry) and we do a ‘give and
get’ exchange every year on campus. I found it in a pile a couple of years ago" she said of the
Forever 21 dress.
The inspiration for wearing one dress for an entire half year came from someone she’s never met.
"A friend sent me a link about a woman named Sheena. It’s called The Uniform Project." Sheena,
a Manhattan resident, made a "little black dress" and wore it every day for a year to raise
money to get children out of the slums of Mumbai, India.
"That is crazy!" Seiffert said admiringly. She was intrigued by the idea of "using fashion
as a means of social change."
"I thought, ‘How long can I hold on? Can I do this for a month?"
She finally settled on six months.
"If it wasn’t for a higher calling, I would have been done with it" after four weeks, she says
now.
Seiffert’s quest is starting to make news. A two-minute segment Wednesday on Toledo’s Fox station, WUPW,
was picked up and aired nationwide on CNN Thursday night.
"I was getting calls from Portland, Florida, Connecticut. Friends and family were saying ‘I saw you
on CNN!’"
But there’s something the CNN audience didn’t know.
Seiffert’s entire project is complicated by a major bit of news she and her husband, Rob, got earlier
this week.
After battling infertility for at least two years "we discovered I’m newly pregnant!"
The couple’s only child, Robby, is 3 1/2.
Now she wonders: Will the dimensions of the seam-stressed gray dress hold out against a pregnant belly
until May 15?
It has to.
She is just one of the people working to raise money for a new home for The Daughter Project. Her church,
BG Covenant, is planning to host a Land Dedication Celebration on Feb. 27 from 2-4 p.m. Plans call for a
Habitat For Humanity-style construction effort. The exact location will be undisclosed, to maintain
security for the girls and young women who will reside there.
"It was shocking to find out that Toledo is the third largest city in the nation for sex
trafficking," said Seiffert, who grew up in Sylvania before graduating from BGSU.
She knows the reasons have to do with Toledo’s location at the junction of the I-80 and I-75 corridor
"up to Canada and down to Mexico," plus "the unfortunate nature of blue-collar and
generational factors" in which young boys actually grow up to be pimps just like dad and girls
prostitutes like mom. "And it’s even better than a drug. A drug can be used up, but people can be
used over and over!"
That’s why tomorrow morning – and the morning after – she’ll be pulling that gray dress out of her
closet.