Face of Nation : Twitter, often used as a soapbox for the world’s frustration and disillusionment, has warmed hearts everywhere this week, after the online community joined forced to track down an exact replica of an autistic girl’s favourite missing dress.
Deborah Price, from the UK county of Staffordshire, took to Twitter on Saturday to ask for help finding a dress for her friend Kate Bell’s daughter, Elsie, who lives with autism.
“(My) friend’s autistic daughter only wears this dress,” Ms Price wrote.
Elsie had lost hers and was, understandably, extremely distressed, as it was all she would wear.
Ms Price, a mum herself, asked people not to judge the family’s situation, as sometimes “people can’t cope with certain stuff and it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things”.
The dress in question was a distressed grey tank dress, in a jersey fabric, featuring a rainbow heart print, by UK brand Next.
Her issue was that this dress came from a line released about three years ago, which meant finding a replica for Elsie would be a challenge.
Ms Price offered to purchase the dress from anyone willing to part with theirs, for the happiness of her friend’s daughter.
Ms Bell’s other friends also issued the call-out, explaining her little girl would only wear the dress “due to sensory issues” and needed the exact same dress so she could wear it to school.
Within a few hours, the response to the posts were extraordinary, as thousands of people around the world jumped to help Elsie and her family.
Some tracked down copies of the lost dress on eBay, others offered to part with their own children’s dresses and some even said they were able to sew an exact copy for Ms Bell’s daughter.
More than 3000 people retweeted Ms Price’s original post, and almost 8000 more liked it, spreading the word far and wide to help Elsie.
