I came across a Dressed: The History of Fashion podcast episode where the fashion historian hosts, April Calahan and Cassidy Zachary, interviewed the Red Dress artist, Kirstie Macleod in 2021. Here are some insights I learnt from the podcast as well as the Red Dress and artist websites referenced in the episode’s show notes.
Macleod was an ambitious, young artist living in London when she received the Red Dress commission from Art Dubai, the leading international art fair taking place every March in the Middle East. Macleod had all along been drawn to fabrics, textures, embroidery, and threads as a medium. She studied textile design and then did a masters degree in visual language, which she described as “a dynamic of working with live-ness.” As Macleod expressed on the podcast episode, having a piece of art or sculpture is one state, but having the piece change form, break down, build up, or move brings in a whole different element, a theatricality, an exciting performative quality. At that point, Macleod had been using dresses to articulate the self, the female body, and portraying in her works the dress and the wearer locked in a kind of struggle, or the dress articulating emotions or processes that the wearer could not by herself. It was the duet, the dynamic, the dance between woman and garment that was of interest to the artist.
With the Art Dubai commission in 2009, Macleod looked into Middle Eastern textile heritage and learned about silk trade and embroidered cloths, which planted the seed in her for what would become the Red Dress. Macloed had also spent much of her childhood traveling abroad with her family and being exposed to different cultures. Her initial idea for the Red Dress was an artwork that combined as many different identities as possible in a single piece as a way of uniting and taking down borders. With the dress constructed out of several panels and pieces, it was able to be disassembled and reassembled over and over as the different panels were sent to different embroiderers to be worked on before returning and being reconstituted in dress form.
In the first year, the Red Dress was an art installation in gallery spaces. A woman, Macleod herself, sits quietly, embroidering in a beautiful dress made of red silk. The tailored bodice of the dress fits her perfectly, while a giant skirt cascades down and pools on the floor at her feet. The dress is covered in embroidery, a diversity of abstract and figurative motifs in an extraordinary range of shapes, sizes, and colors. No two motifs are alike. Zooming in, we realize the adorned sitter is actually embroidering the very gown she is wearing. Zooming out, we see that she is doing so within a plexiglass cube. Both the woman and the dress are on display and conveying a message.
By the third year or so, the plexiglass cube had come away as the Red Dress moved from being an art installation in a gallery space to a community piece that is “certainly outside the box,” in the artist’s own words. From then on, the Red Dress would be displayed by itself on a mannequin, so that all of the added embroidery could be seen. The dress itself is now empowered and strong. The Red Dress had become less about the artist trying to make statements about the work and more about “celebrating the feminine and all that is.” At this point of the project, with the dress reaching far and wide around the world, Macloed realized the Red Dress was becoming about creating meaningful connections with others. As Macloed heard some of the harrowing life stories shared by the Red Dress‘ contributors and saw the beautiful embroidery sewn by many women in marginalized communities, she came to feel some responsibility to create a platform for these women’s voices to be heard and for the Red Dress to make a difference to the contributors’ lives. After all, textile art, or the act of dressing the body, is an expression of shared humanity, a meaning encapsulated by the Red Dress project as it becomes as much about the women who embroider the garment as it is about celebrating the Red Dress as a beautiful and intricate art form.
Among the embroidered elements, one creation backstory I found especially inspiring involved the story on the front panel of the Red Dress told by Rwandan women who work with KISANY. KISANY is a social enterprise textile label that has created a space to train women in fine needlework and sells the linens embroidered by them around the world. The women participating in KISANY lost their families in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and, as widows, they are ostracized by their communities. With KISANY, these women are trained in a craft and gain the ability to earn an income, a personally life-changing development for them. Their work also gives them an opportunity to come together to share community with one another and to heal from their collective trauma.
Despite the intricate needlework they can produce, the Rwandan women from KISANY purposefully chose to embroider in a child-like manner for the Red Dress. Their work depicts a child, rendered in black, in the center of a tight black circle, while a tall man with a machete hovers overhead. The black circle spirals out, goes through a river of blood, passes a tree on fire, and eventually becomes more expansive, changing into rainbow colors and ultimately transforming into a sun. The creators of this war and peace / heaven and hell duality call their work From Darkness to Light to document their personal journey through violence and genocide, followed by the rebuilding of their lives after.
From Darkness to Light
Sources & Further Reading
“The Red Dress Embroidery Project with Artist Kirstie Macleod” podcast episode of Dressed: The History of Fashion. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-dressed-the-history-of-fas-29000690/
The Red Dress website. https://reddressembroidery.com/
Artist Kirstie Macleod’s website. https://www.kirstiemacleod.co.uk/
Comments