I had a chance to see the Red Dress when it was exhibited at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in its first stop of a multi-year and city U.S. tour. This is an incredible art piece! At its base, it is, as its name states, a red dress. But it is also so much more, with beautiful and diverse embroidery, appliques and embellishments added on to the underlying dress form by many different hands. I was amazed by the variety of embroidered elements, from geometric shapes and colorful florals to representations of people and animals (I particularly love the fuzzy bee!).
The Red Dress is a project founded by British artist Kirstie Macleod in 2009 as an investigation of identity. It uses embroidery by many hands as a medium of communication and subversion. Constructed out of 87 panels of silk dupion, pieces of the Red Dress traveled around the world from 2009 to 2023 and were continuously embroidered onto. Now, all over the dress are hand-stitched motifs by 380 embroiderers (367 of whom were women and girls) from 51 countries, which come together to create a site of empowerment, advocacy, and resistance, all in one dress. The goal of the Red Dress is to generate global dialogue about identity through its varied embroidery.
To find artisans to work on the Red Dress, Macleod first used personal and professional connections to contact artists and commission them to embroider a segment of the dress. As word of the dress spread, people began requesting to participate. The dress in its final form includes the handiwork of established embroiderers as well as people embroidering for the first time. Despite the diversity of embroidered works on the Red Dress, the many contributors all answer one prompt -- to add an element that communicates an aspect of their particular identity.
Since dresses are widely regarded as gendered clothing, I also appreciated the Red Dress as a symbol of female empowerment, given how many women and girls who were also often refugees, asylum seekers, war survivors, or living in poverty, contributed work to, and expressed themselves in, the piece. Additionally, there is so much resonance for me, as a person of multicultural heritage, living in a city of great diversity, and as a global citizen, to see the many different voices and identities come together in the Red Dress to form a community spanning far flung parts of the world.
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