A red silk dupion dress covered in intricate embroidery is making its way to Kigali this November, but it is more than a work of fashion. The Red Dress is a global artwork stitched by 380 people across 51 countries, including six women from Rwanda whose contribution tells a story of loss, resilience and hope. ALSO READ: Rwanda’s fashion industry eyes global reach through UK exchange The panel from Rwanda carries one of the dress’s most confronting images, showing a man killing a child with a machete alongside a black spiral turning into a rainbow sun. For British textile artist Kirstie Macleod, who conceived The Red Dress as a platform for personal stories, the Kigali embroidery captures both tragedy and hope. “It’s depicting the horrors of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and then their healing journey to fulfilled lives and the community that they now have with the other women,” she said. ALSO READ: Kezem’s ‘Kumizi’ collection scoops top African fashion award The Red Dress has been described by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest global collaborative embroidery project. It also holds records for involving the most countries in the making of one garment and for having the widest age range of contributors, from a child of six to a woman in her late 80s. The dress, made from silk dupion and weighing 6.8 kilograms, took 14 years to complete, from 2009 to 2023. It is made up of an estimated 1 billion stitches and will remain on display at the Museum of Brisbane, Australia, until September 13 before continuing its journey to Rwanda in November and the United Kingdom in 2027. Macleod said she conceived the project as “a platform for vulnerable voices.” The dress, she added, gave her a way to explore identity through a form that is at once personal and public. “The dress is such a potent symbol of femininity and it depicts a being, a form,” she said. “I found it a very useful way to communicate ideas of identity.” The project also reached into communities far from where the final garment would eventually be shown. For its first 11 years, Macleod ran it without funding, sending fabric pieces to embroiderers across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe and paying many of them herself. Among the contributors was Lyn Roberts, a member of the Allthreads Embroidery Community in Norman Park, Queensland, who helped create a panel in 2018 featuring Uluru, kangaroos, gum leaves and coral. She said the experience took on new meaning when she saw the completed dress in Brisbane. “The panel was finished, it got sent off, and most of us didn’t think about it after that,” she said. “It feels amazing to see it, humbling when you see all the other work around it, of course, which is so magnificent, but there’s a sense of pride in being part of such a positive project.” Other panels carry their own histories. Macleod said two Palestinian women living in a refugee camp in Lebanon contributed shoulder details in 2009 and are still there 17 years later. Only 28 people have worn The Red Dress, and Macleod said she receives frequent requests from people hoping to wear it for weddings, performances and proms. However, she turns them down. “I say sorry, no, it’s just for the embroiderers of the project,” she said.
