Wearing Red

Wearing my new red dress on my first ever photo shoot

This week I bought a red dress. I wanted a signature outfit I could wear for a professional photo shoot for my new look website page (still in progress).

I didn’t want something kind of commercial, perfectly polished or staged. I had the best photographer for the occasion with my friend Chelle Wallace who I met when we curated our first exhibition together in 2017 Posts From the Big Flood as part of the Murwillumbah Art Trail.

She suggested to go down the bottom of the street to where there was a concrete pipe. As soon as I saw the site, I loved it. I felt so at ease as the whole idea of this location was sufficiently quirky to appeal to my sense of fun and creativity. Not perfect but perfectly imperfect.

I hadn’t realised the significance of this day until I started writing about the dress in an email promoting my first official online course Creative Calendars which starts tomorrow.

I realised I have never owned a red dress, never worn a red dress and never thought to wear one until I started working with my Icelandic coach Sigrun. Her brand is unashamedly red and many of the women at the summit in Zurich last month all wore red in honour of the event. Not having planned to go to this event while I was in Iceland, I had only packed my backpackers travel gear of jeans and grey shirt. I felt very underdressed.

Fast forward to this week and proudly wearing my new dress. I felt I had really come of age. My mother never actually said don’t wear red, but it was an unspoken understanding she conveyed that only “women of ill repute” showed their cleavage or wore red.

While this dress is technically more crimson than fire engine red, it still felt wildly liberating to wear and was part of my personal celebration of my new status as an online artist and creative mentor.

I’m going to be wearing red more often now. Be warned! Things are about to get interesting….