Blue Dress Meditation
by Lottie McCrindell
In broad blue brushstrokes, Blue Dress Meditation is a poem about memory, desire and longing, and the ways dresses, bodies and art-making hold, process and transform these emotions. It began with a dream I had in August of an enormous blue dress spreading across the horizon. From that dream, other memories and imaginings of blue dresses gathered. A single stanza could not contain them all, so I pieced together the poem with asterisks, or ‘stitches’. The lines ‘Blue dresses of gigantic feelings/ girls swimming in tidal sea pools’, were inspired by Shelly Goldsmith’s Dresses for Giants exhibition in Margate, which I visited in September 2022, just after finishing my Masters — a liminal period between full-time education and stepping into working life. The scale, colour and display of Shelly’s dresses left a magical, lasting impression onme.
My undergraduate degree was in English Literature at Cambridge and my Masters was in Printed Textiles at the University for the Creative Arts, where Shelly is a Reader in Textiles. Since the age of 17, I have had a pressing interest in the intersection of literature and fashion, text and textile, but it was only after my Masters that I began to explore this through my own poetry and curation. Feelings of nostalgia, desire and longing have become more intense for me since I finished my Masters. Life shifts quickly after university: friends drift or move away and grief and adult concerns emerge. Alongside this, I have found a spirituality in art, fashion and poetry and I feel deep gratitude for my mum, who introduced me to this world, and for the community of makers and friends I have met and collaborated with along the way.
My meditation on blue dresses is ongoing. I wrote this poem between Christmas and New Year, finishing it on the first full moon of 2026, 3rd January. When I sent it to Alexia, she shared she had recently met Shelly on the Gemini supermoon in December and had also visited Dresses for Giants, which influenced her move to the seaside. If anyone has their own blue dress murmurations, I would love to hear them…
Blue Dress Meditation
Tonight, the moon is blue like my dress
*
There sleeps a dream
on a dress of midnight blue
its body resting on cyanotype pansies
the irises of three open eyes
*
Last night, I dreamt of a blue dress
enormous across the horizon
blue enough to hold the sky
blue enough to remember every interior
and every exterior at once
It was not hanging or worn
but spreading, the way water spreads
the way memory does when it forgets its edges
*
An asterisk is a stitch
a place where memory tightens
and tentatively holds
*
A woman sits on her bedroom floor
arranging blue fragments of dress
She lays and layers them like paint
before stitching them together
to form a spirited surface
*
Blue dresses of gigantic feelings
girls swimming in tidal sea pools
*
For three years, I wore an ultramarine dress of such intense longing
the dye seeped into and stained my skin
*
I walk past our old house
look through the bedroom window for my baby blue dress
but it reflects only the sky
*
A blue silk dress with white polka dots floats through the air
its printed pattern dissolving
into light cloud cover
*
Off a steel structure resembling a tree
she suspends blue clothes from her closet
She titles the installation Blue Days
*
Think of her dancing in a layered blue dress
how the fabric absorbs, reflects and scatters light
how your eye receives this light
how we receive each other
*
Trying to understand the depth of this deepening blue
her body cascading, waterfalling
in a blue dress
Lottie McCrindell is a fashion and textile poet and curator. She is the founder of TEXTUS, having co-curated its inaugural exhibition, TEXTUS: in-between text and textile (2023) and solo curated its second exhibition, HOUSE OF HABERDASH (2025), both at the Torriano Meeting House, London. Collaboration sits at the heart of her curatorial and poetic practices and she regularly works with fashion designers, writing poems responding to their collections for their runway shows. Her most recent poetry-dress collaboration with Zandra Rhodes was exhibited as part of Dress Poetics at the Nymphenburg Palace, Munich. @lottie_mccrindell@textus.network