If you ask me, what is it about a red dress, I am reluctant to say.  But sometimes I am the embodiment of a red dress.  It’s the door to my other self, to carefree without end, without limits, it represents the sound of crickets in summer, or else walking down a cobblestone street, seeing and waiting to be seen, tempting the air itself. Or else it’s the feeling of “walking on a red carpet” coming into the theater of personal fulfillment, no matter how absurd.  Or else, because I love cars, it conveys the intensity and beauty of a red Ferrari, that particular power of form and substance, the sound of it, the feel of its lines.  The redness of it. Of course it’s all true. What better illusion, what better metaphor. You slip into a red dress and your mood changes instantly and your energy level becomes higher. You are suddenly confident and courageous.  Or a fine copy of that. It also summons the magic mood that something unexpected and beautiful will happen.

In medieval Europe, kings, cardinals, and nobility wore red. In classic Rome, the most powerful men were called the coccinati, meaning the “ones who wear red.”

For artists Marina Abramovic a red dress means energy. Watching The Artist is Present made me think about the color choices of the dresses she was wearing at different times throughout the exhibition in MoMa — which has her sitting in silence across from any number of museum visitors almost every day. For the opening of the exhibition, she chose the bright red dress. Then she wore the meditative, deep blue dress. And then back to red, to gain new energy because of the increasing difficulty of the performance. Last Marina chose to wear a white dress to achieve a calm state for her final month of performing. In red, she was intense, assertive, while in dark blue and in white she seemed reticent, withdrawn.