Artists Bring Spiritual Meaning to Customized Lady Dior Handbags

PARIS — The bags in this year’s Dior Lady Art project come with a side of spiritual salve.

Artists taking part in the ninth edition of the project used their interpretation of the house’s signature Lady Dior bag to explore deeper questions about nature, ancestral traditions and sacred symbols, transforming a simple accessory into a storytelling platform.

Dior tapped four U.S.-based artists for this edition, to be pre-launched on Nov. 7 at its historic flagship on Avenue Montaigne in Paris and its boutique at the Plaza 66 mall in Shanghai, ahead of a global rollout in November and December in selected stores.

In addition to Jeffrey Gibson, back for the second consecutive year, the participants include Vaughn Spann, Danielle McKinney and Faith Ringgold, who died in April at the age of 93 before she could see several collaborations with Dior come to fruition.

They are joined by Paris-based Vietnamese artist Duy Anh Nhan Duc; Turkey’s Hayal Pozanti and Canadian Anna Weyant, both based in the U.S.; Chinese artists Liang Yuanwei and Huang Yuxing; Sara Flores from Peru, and South Korean artist Woo Kukwon.

In total, there are 30 limited-edition styles to choose from, with prices ranging from 7,000 euros to 25,000 euros.

Nhan Duc and Weyant’s creations were revealed at the “L’Or de Dior” exhibition in Beijing in September, and more will teased at the “Art ‘N Dior” exhibition in Shanghai next month, the house said.

Materials range from the sculpted and cast metal flowers of Weyant’s all-gold version — a nod to Dior’s bestselling J’adore fragrance – to the pineapple leather used by Flores, a practitioner of Kené art, a sacred system of lines and geometric patterns endemic to the women of Peru’s Shipibo-Conibo ethnic group.

The lining of the bags is made of a coarse cotton textile known in the Amazon as tocuyo, which is hand-painted with vegetal dyes.

“The jungle is my studio. Being Indigenous entails a sense of connection with life, with the Earth and its inhabitants, with the forest and the river as beings,” Flores explained in a question-and-answer provided by Dior. “My work is a portal to the spiritual dimension.”

From his childhood years spent in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, Nhan Duc has also developed a deep reverence for nature.

“I would walk barefoot in the streets. Back then, there were still dirt roads and during the monsoon, I would shower under the rain gutters,” he recalled in an interview with WWD.

After moving to France at the age of 10, he briefly lost that connection, but his practice as an artist has been all about celebrating the nature that surrounds us.

“I love collecting plants, and so do my two daughters. I will get down on all fours in the middle of a roundabout. Cars will be honking because they have no idea what I’m doing,” he confessed with a laugh.

Nhan Duc is best known for his installations incorporating dried dandelions. One of them, “Le Champs des Possibles,” was featured in the Dior flagship on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées last year, but this was his first time working on a product. 

For his bag design, the botanical artist created a plaster cast by imprinting soil with plants and wire mesh. The Dior teams then reproduced the patterns by pressing them into leather — though in this case, it was a vegan alternative, apple leather, embroidered with plant fibers such as linen and accented with gilding.

The charms are metallic versions of seeds including samara, clover and poppy, but inside the bag is a transparent acrylic drop containing an actual dandelion egret, designed to work like a talisman.

“I hope it’s a lucky seed. In any case, it’s brought me a lot of luck since I started working with it,” Nhan Duc said. “It’s whatever you want it to be. I mean, if you don’t believe a four-leaf clover is lucky, it will never bring you luck. But if you invest an object with magical properties, then positive thoughts can follow.”

Gibson, who fuses traditional Native American craftsmanship with an almost psychedelic pop aesthetic, adorned his Lady Dior with his version of lucky charms: 70 3D-printed heart padlocks recalling the love locks attached to the railings of Paris bridges.

The design was inspired by the adorned punching bags that are his best-known works.

“This time I decided to base my design off of a punching bag sculpture that I made in 2017, titled ‘Love is the Drug.’ The title comes from a song sung by Grace Jones of the same title and the punching bag is covered with different heart charms made in different materials,” Gibson said in a Q&A with Dior.

The bag is fully beaded on the other side with the word “love” repeated.

“I often return to themes of love in my practice. My relationships complicate and deepen what I believe love looks like and continue to reveal how complex and layered the notion of ‘love’ is. It is often hard won and requires a lot of work from all involved. It can be both selfish and selfless to love and to be loved. This is the story of this Lady Dior bag,” he said.