The IKKIVI Podcast: Exploring Fashion, Culture and Values · Nivi Murthy

S4E01: This Record-Breaking Red Dress Took 14 Years to Make | Kirstie Macleod

·52 min·3 clips

A supporter working with women in DR Congo and Rwanda said the women were changed after embroidering the dress.

A single dress becomes a meeting place. The guest starts with a simple, slightly impossible wish: make a cross-cultural work where many people and traditions can gather without one voice taking over. She did not know if it would work. That uncertainty gives the story its charge, because the red dress grows through trust, invitations, funding questions, and the stubborn belief that collaboration can take an artwork somewhere one maker could not carry it alone. The host keeps asking, and those questions bring the guest back to the project's first sparks. The strongest moments come when embroidery turns into a language for people who do not share words. Sinai stays bright in her memory. She describes Bedouin women living remotely in tiny little dwellings and mountainside villages, then wearing the dress under desert stars while others danced around it. Hampi has a different pull. She links it to travels in 2002, to Lambani women, and to the non-verbal communication that helped shape the red dress before anyone could see its full form. The dress keeps moving. It has passed through places named in the conversation, including Mexico, Italy, France, Egypt, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, India, and the Pacific Northwest of America. But this is not travel for travel's sake. The guest wants the commissioned embroiderers to stand with the finished work in their own countries and chosen venues, not remain distant names attached to panels. That part feels beautiful, and also heavy. She has completed the Egypt piece and still has many more makers to reach, so the project clearly has another long road ahead. The host catches the pressure in that. The guest does not treat it as plain stress. The work still excites her, even as the care and logistics keep growing. Young artists get a useful thread too. Her advice is soft-spoken but practical: community-rooted, collaborative projects can be easier to fund because people can understand the human purpose behind them. The conversation closes without turning the dress into a grand slogan. It leaves it as something made by hands, places, memory, and trust built before language quite catches up.

As heard by us

A long-made dress becomes a clear lesson in collaboration and cultural memory.

Kirstie Macleod's red dress project feels like a measured work of art shaped by patience, travel, and shared effort. The strongest passages are the Bedouin women in Sinai and Egypt, the desert celebration, and the sense that embroidery became a common language when words were…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a red dress story about making art across cultures and by collaboration.

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