This year, the ladies are appropriating the Lady Dior, that famous accessory gifted by Bernadette Chirac to Lady Diana in 1995 for the opening of the Cézanne exhibition at the Grand Palais. The artistic director of the house of Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, gave free reign to 11 women artists from the four corners of the world, to reinvent the legendary bag, transforming its material, its fabric, its colours, its handle and pretty much every detail of this excellent piece. This is the third time Dior has invited artists to metamorphose its flagship piece, and this time around each of the 11 have catapulted the bag into a new dimension.
A symbol of elegance and Parisian glamour, the understated and geometric shape of Lady Dior, now an object of art, inspires artists. The French sculptor, painter, photographer and video-maker, Morgane Tschiember decided to entwine the bag in a cell made from ropes, a direct reference to the Japanese ancestral art of shibari, a sexual practice that involves restricting one or more partners by tying them up with thin ropes: “Shibari is a series of works that I am endlessly developing in art and design,” she explains, “My Lady Dior bag takes on the technique of knots, used by Japanese samurais. They would tie up their enemies with a rope. The system of knots they’d developed meant, in the case of exchanging people, they could leave the enemy far away from them, pull a cord and the all the knots would come undone. The enemy could get away and they could recuperate someone from their clan in exchange.”
Lady Dior Art – Morgane Tschiember
