Hit Fringe show Dressed returns to Scotland for three dates

The award-winning Dressed is a true story told by four women who have been friends since they were 10 years old.

They came together again at the request of Lydia Higginson, a clothes designer who had set herself the challenge of making her entire wardrobe in a year.

She subsequently gave away all her shop-bought clothes and now only wears garments she has made herself.

Higginson documented the process in Made My Wardrobe, a blog where she later wrote how the project was: “Never just about clothes. It was about reclaiming my body.”

She recounted how, a few years earlier, she was subjected to an attack where robbers stripped her clothes at gunpoint.

“My body was taken from me,” she wrote, explaining that making her own wardrobe would help her “not to feel afraid any more”. She then contacted theatre-maker Josie Dale-Jones, singer Imogen Nobahar Mahdavi and dancer Olivia Norris, all friends since primary school.

When they met, Higginson gave each one of four costumes she had made in the months after the attack: a showgirl, a warrior, a clown and a silent, shadowy woman.

“The four costumes represent the four women I had become in order to overcome what had happened,” she wrote.

The showgirl “represents the pressure women feel to be perfect, beautiful and pure”, the warrior embodies the “rally cry of the #MeToo movement” and the clown or joker the need for humour in overcoming trauma. “The dark woman does not have a voice, but there is still a power in her silence,” she wrote.

Using direct address, movement, original music, dance and live sewing, the four-women express Higginson’s story in a way she says has been liberating and helpful to her recovery.

While she continues to explore these events onstage, Higginson has chosen to move away from speaking directly about the experience, which production company ThisEgg specifically ask is referred to using the phrase “stripped at gunpoint” rather than “sexual assault”.

“A messy reason for that is the amalgamation of sexual assault stories in the press,” says Dale-Jones, who directs Dressed. “It’s a trigger warning too. The other reason we want that used is because the show is about wanting to be dressed again.”

Despite its traumatic origins and 16+ age guidance, Dressed is “really joyful and a celebration”, says Dale-Jones, who plays the clown character.

Working with Higginson has been empowering to each of the women, she says.

“On one level at least, Dressed is about the four of us and our friendship,” she says. “It’s been amazing to see the way that everyone has taken ownership of an event that one of us has experienced.

“Making the show with three of my best friends, watching them making things, think and challenge and tell, has been very inspiring and liberating.”

Dale-Jones continues: “We made the show when the #MeToo movement was gathering momentum and want it to be seen as making a bit of a political statement and to encourage those other women to stand up. If it can empower people, or make people feel like they want to hold on to their friends a bit closer, that’s great.

“Mainly, it’s about doing what you need to do to heal yourself. For Lydia that has been sewing and her friends.”

March 14 to 16, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 7.45pm, £11 to £17. Tel: 0141 552 4267. www.tron.co.uk www.thisegg.co.uk www.mademywardrobe.com