Taking inspiration from how the Red Dress brought people together in a collective art-making endeavor, the Southern Vermont Arts Center, where the Red Dress was exhibited over the summer of 2023, commissioned the same dressmaker, Gail Falconer, to create the Calico Dress for its local and extended community to adorn in a similar manner. As the Red Dress tours the world, more Calico dresses are being planned. According to the exhibition notes, the Red Dress artist Kirstie Macleod envisions showing the Red Dress alongside its calico sisters some day.
In contrast with the Red Dress, the Calico Dress feels distinctly American. When I saw the Calico Dress, about 15 different people had worked on it and since they came from the region around the Southern Vermont Arts Center, the designs added onto the Calico Dress reflected the nature, culture, geography, and history from the contributors’ lives. There were roses, tulips, sunflowers, dandelions, and different wildflowers; a vegetable garden; bees and honeycomb; varied snowflakes; a sun, a cloud, and the rays of a rainbow; different species of birds from an outlined dove bearing an olive branch to a highly detailed warbler depicted with a yellow breast and black, gray, and white-mottled wings; an appliquéd red gingham patch; and many words rendered in English, along with one “Shalom.”
The fabric choice for the Calico Dress itself was unmistakably American, as calico was commonly used for women’s everyday clothing in the American frontier during the 1800s. Compared to the silk dupion of the Red Dress, calico, an unbleached coarse cotton, is clearly the humble cousin here. Perhaps that is part of the intent of the Calico Dress – even as a wealthy nation and global power, maybe we in the United States could approach the world and its many peoples with humility and respect? At the same time, we can celebrate our own diversity, as evidenced by the varied motifs sewn on by the Calico Dress contributors, just as the Red Dress is a canvas for the 380 embroiderers from 51 countries who worked on it. The Calico Dress, appropriately less ambitious in scale than the Red Dress in reflecting just the part of the U.S. surrounding its creation, serves as a modern-day patchwork quilt for our regional communities, paying homage to that particular American craft form.
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