A British royal princess announces her wedding. The world's eyes turn to the ceremony, and above all to the dress she will wear. The palace commissions a historic gown from a storied haute couture house in Paris. Eight months of work. A total of 9,057 hours of labor. Seamstresses in Paris, lace artisans in Alencon, France, and embroiderers in Mumbai, India, work without pause under extreme secrecy. As the dress slowly takes shape, the secrets and the pain hidden behind its splendor come into view one by one.
"Lacrima," a play that uses a single wedding dress to probe the underside of the fashion industry in an age of global division of labor, makes its Korean premiere on Oct. 2-3 at the Seongnam Arts Center Opera House. Produced by the Theatre National de Strasbourg in France, it has drawn praise since its 2024 debut at venues including the Avignon Festival, the Odeon Theatre in Paris and the Barbican Centre in London.
"Lacrima" means "tear" in Latin. Caroline Guiela Nguyen, the Vietnamese-French writer and director, said in a recent written interview that it was a word she had always liked. "The sound is beautiful, and I thought the images it evokes were beautiful too," Nguyen said. "It carries the wish to convey what causes people pain today, what stirs them most deeply — the tears of our own time."
A key impetus for the work came from the embroiderers of Mumbai. While preparing the production, Nguyen learned that behind the elaborate embroidery of European haute couture lay the labor of male artisans in India, thousands of kilometers away. Nguyen later traveled to Mumbai and was overwhelmed by the precision and delicacy of their work. "I cried not out of sadness but because of the beauty," Nguyen said. "It was the beauty of the gestures of the work, the collective effort, a craftsmanship that transcends borders and generations."
The staging that carries this heavy subject is polished and unconventional. Moving beyond the conventions of theater, it weaves stage and video together to lay out three worksites — Paris, Alencon and Mumbai — in a single space. Split screens intercut events unfolding in different places and time zones, and the actors' performances lock into the video at a rapid tempo. French, English and Tamil coexist on the same stage. Events happening simultaneously across the world unfold as if the audience were watching a television series.
The video is more than a stage device. When the day ends in Paris, someone in Mumbai keeps working a needle. When one region sleeps, labor continues in another. A global production system in which people who have never seen one another's faces are connected around the clock to finish a single dress is visualized before the audience.
At the center of it all is the wedding dress. Nguyen calls it "another, unspoken protagonist." At first a symbol of beauty, luxury and perfection, the dress shifts in meaning as the story advances, accumulating the hands and bodies of countless artisans, the hours poured into its making, and the pain and secrets concealed behind it.
A single wedding dress holds capitalism, history, geography, class, geopolitical relations and the lives of many people, all entangled. What drew Nguyen's attention was "the contrast between the extreme visibility of the finished wedding dress and the almost total invisibility of the people who made it — artisans working with devotion where no one can see them."
Even so, "Lacrima" does not settle into a didactic account of labor exploitation in the fashion industry. "What I wanted least of all was to say, 'Look at these poor people working to make things for the rich,'" Nguyen said. "That would demean them in another way and, in the end, strip them of their power." The contradiction is that artisans can love their work and take pride in their skill while still suffering under an unfair labor system and the logic of capital. "Lacrima" declines to simplify in either direction and looks instead at that complicated reality itself.
So what does the princess's wedding dress — 9,057 hours of labor over eight months, passing through the hands of artisans in Paris, Alencon and Mumbai — actually look like? And will that dazzling gown ever be revealed in full on stage? The answer awaits at the theater.
