Lady Dior Art Project Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary

THE EVER-EVOLVING Lady Dior bag is the definition of timelessness, steeped in legacy and savoir-faire elegance. The 10th iteration of the Dior Lady Art Project, in which international artists create their own interpretation of the famed silhouette, features designs by Eva Jospin, Inès Longevial, Jessica Cannon and Sophia Loeb, who reveal the creative inspiration behind their deeply reminiscent designs.

Here, BAZAAR meets the four artists tasked with the exclusive project.

Related: Inside the fascinating history of the Lady Dior

Jessica Cannon

Harper’s BAZAAR: What was the inspiration behind the design of your Dior Lady Art project bag?

Jessica Cannon: I took inspiration from the history of Dior, particularly Christian Dior’s autobiography, Justine Picardie’s biography of Catherine Dior, recent haute couture collections, Victoire de Castellane’s jewellery pieces, as well as my own drawings and paintings. At first, I explored many avenues, but I always came back to this idea of eternity. This led me to create three interpretations of the Lady Dior based on two drawings.

The first sketch, Lunar Return, explores the passage of time through celestial shapes crossing the sky. On one of the inserts of the Lady Dior bag, moonbeams extend toward the sides, then continue on the opposite side, where they wrap around the centre to frame a smaller, more distant moon. We have used this design on the small Lady Dior bag, with blue and green rhinestones and pearlescent discs, as well as on the mini Lady Dior bag, adorned with iridescent pearls, sculpted tulle and an embellished handle.

The second design, The Sky for Catherine, was created intuitively, based on work around sunbeams and spirals in different compositions. In a sketch, I drew a shape from the inside of the spiral, which reminded me of the silhouette of a dove. At the time, I was reading articles about Catherine Dior and felt that the dove represented what I wished for her: to be free, basking in the sky, close to the sun that nourished her garden. We used this design on the medium-sized Lady Dior bag in a palette of light grey, celadon and lilac, with pleated tulle embellished with iridescent sequins, crystals and a pearly dove as the centrepiece.

HB: To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this project, how does it feel to join the speciality Dior Lady Art artists community?

JC: It is an honour for me to participate in the 10th edition of Dior Lady Art. I have long admired Dior’s collaborations with artists, so having the chance to work on something together was a dream come true. With this project, my paintings were translated into another form for the first time, and seeing what the Dior team did with their knowledge and materials was very stimulating, exhilarating and inspiring.

HB: What was a special moment from this Dior Lady Art project that you will always remember?

JC: When I received the invitation to collaborate with Dior, I was surprised and delighted. It happened about a month after I started working with my gallery, Gavlak, and I had no idea that my work had been selected for this project. Dior Lady Art is an invitation to question the distinctions between artistic disciplines. I am grateful for the trust Dior has placed in me, which has allowed my work to become part of a rich and vibrant history.

I hope that the pieces we have created together will be appreciated today and passed on to future generations.

HB: Globally, the Dior Lady Art project highlights and celebrates craftsmanship, creativity and innovation. How does this project differ from your traditional body of work and artistic process?

JC: Each bag we created represents images that I usually paint on much larger surfaces. Using embroidery techniques and light-catching materials such as glass beads and crystals, the Dior ateliers transposed the layered effects of my paintings to a more intimate scale. As the bags move and the lighting changes throughout the day, subtle colour shifts reveal new dimensions in the design.

Sophia Loeb

Harper’s BAZAAR: What was the inspiration behind the design of your Dior Lady Art project bag?

Sophia Loeb: Dior’s codes – the elegance, the precision, the kind of femininity that never feels ornamental – speak to me deeply. Where Dior might begin with structure, I begin with emotion – but the two meet through touch, composition and gesture. This collaboration became a beautiful merging of my universe with theirs.

We approached the reinterpretation by engaging deeply with

the visual and structural language of my paintings. Specific details – fragments of texture, colour and form – were carefully selected for their ability to translate into the architecture of the Lady Dior bag.

We considered not only what would be visually compelling, but also how painterly techniques could be reimagined through the craftsmanship and tactile dimension of couture. The inspiration lay in the dialogue between canvas and object – how a work of art could evolve into a functional, sculptural form while preserving its emotional richness and materiality.

The fusion emerged through a mutual appreciation for craftsmanship, detail and storytelling. Dior’s iconic codes – elegance, structure and timeless sophistication – provided a refined canvas onto which I could project my world of layered textures, vivid colour contrasts and organic forms. By integrating elements of my artistic language into the classic silhouette of the Lady Dior, we created a synthesis where history and experimentation coexist. It was a collaboration grounded in respect – allowing my vision to resonate through Dior’s legacy.

HB: To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this project, how does it feel to join the speciality Dior Lady Art artists community?

SL: Being part of Dior Lady Art feels like stepping into a conversation between art and craftsmanship that transcends time. The Lady Dior bag is iconic – a symbol of elegance and strength – and to reinterpret it through my own artistic language is both an honour and a deeply personal gesture. As a painter, I’m fascinated by surfaces that hold memory – and the Lady Dior becomes that for me: a canvas that travels, that breathes with its wearer. Merging my visual language with Dior’s legacy creates this beautiful collision of textures, cultures and stories.

To reinterpret the Lady Dior through my visual language – where colour is emotion and form is intuition – is a rare kind of alchemy. It’s a way of giving form to feeling. This collaboration allows me to bring my artistic universe into dialogue with the Lady Dior bag that already holds so much history. It’s an honour to be part of such a legacy.

HB: What was a special moment from this Dior Lady Art project that you will always remember?

SL: For me, Dior Lady Art is a beautiful invitation to blur the lines between art, fashion and everyday life. It’s a way of celebrating art not just as something to be looked at, but something to be lived with, carried, worn. That feels powerful – especially as a painter – to see my work move beyond the frame and into the world in such an iconic form. It’s also about breaking boundaries: between disciplines, between cultures, between what’s considered fine art and what’s considered craft.

Dior has always embraced transformation, and this project continues that spirit – honouring tradition while creating space for new voices and new ways of seeing.

What makes this creation truly special to me is the dialogue between artistic vision and craftsmanship. I am particularly struck by the bag handles and the meticulous exploration of diverse textures – how Dior was able to translate my painterly universe into something tactile and wearable. The way they understood and materialised the textures I envisioned, using various artisanal techniques, was both powerful and deeply meaningful. It felt as though they didn’t just interpret my work – they embodied it, giving form to emotion and transforming abstract expression into something tangible.

HB: Globally, the Dior Lady Art project highlights and celebrates craftsmanship, creativity and innovation. How does this project differ from your traditional body of work and artistic process?

SL: What I love most about the Lady Dior is its sculptural quality – it feels like a small architectural object, timeless and self-contained, yet completely open to interpretation. What excites me most is the freedom it offers – the possibility to explore my painting practice in a new, tactile form, where people can wear the artwork and experience it in motion. I discovered textures, fabrics and techniques I never imagined were possible, and that opened up a whole new dimension in my creative process.

Inès Longevial

Harper’s BAZAAR: What was the inspiration behind the design of your Dior Lady Art project bag?

Inès Longevial: I wanted it to be joyful, playful and exuberant. As a child, I watched my grandmother assemble fabrics with infinite patience. Patchwork has always been part of my imagination. So I worked on an assemblage of faces and details, such as flowers, suns and snakes. The softness and bounce of the quilted satin make it almost friendly. First, I wanted to work with patchwork. We tested several fabrics, quilting techniques and embroidery to achieve this balanced result. For the other bag, it was the relief embroidery and a very tactile approach to the materials. A new thread embroidery technique with multidirectional crossings allows for subtle tonal variations. What interested me about this was that the embroidery could follow and reproduce the brushstrokes. Every detail invites you to touch it.

HB: To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this project, how does it feel to join the speciality Dior Lady Art artists community?

IL: First and foremost, it’s an honour, and then it’s an opportunity to breathe new life into an iconic object and, at the same time, learn how my work can embody it. It’s an opportunity for a new adventure with new encounters, treasures, flashes of inspiration and windows opening onto endless possibilities.

HB: What was a special moment from this Dior Lady Art project that you will always remember?

IL: The supreme freedom of collaboration. The invitation to take a leap into the unknown and the feeling of having created companion bags that are almost alive. I was blown away by the enchanting meetings, which were organised like shows. A parade of glass beads, crystals, satin, velvet, feathers, embroidery, sequins, rhinestones . . . I knew from start to finish that what would remain was this intimate, funny, elegant and slightly cheeky show-off.

HB: Globally, the Dior Lady Art project highlights and celebrates craftsmanship, creativity and innovation. How does this project differ from your traditional body of work and artistic process?

IL: I work a lot with starry faces, and Christian Dior’s lucky star seemed like a common symbol, almost a sign. We were able to work with the star in different embroidery forms, each one more magical than the last.

Eva Jospin

HB: What was the inspiration behind the design of your Dior Lady Art project bag?

Eva Jospin: In my Balcon series of sculptures, I highlight the vantage points, the panoramic and symbolic view offered by the balcony. For my Lady Dior, I took up this idea so that the bag represents a little break, a portable view that can be carried with you: your own balcony!

What really amused me was this portable view – a view of the city from the balcony. So, I stylised and reinterpreted in my own manner the balcony of the iconic 30 Montaigne, the cradle of Parisian elegance that has been home to Dior’s haute couture ateliers since the beginning of the maison. It was my way of paying tribute to the savoir- faire and excellence of these artisans.

I wanted to create a sculptural bag, mixing 3D elements with embroidery, intertwined with nature that had overgrown on the balcony. On the other side of the bag, only the embroidered and colourful composition of a fresh spring garden appears. With the Chanakya ateliers, with whom I regularly collaborate, we have already worked on different scales, both large and medium. For this Lady Dior, we wished to work on a smaller scale, with a very shiny, extremely rich and beautiful silk satin. We carried out numerous tests before achieving the desired result, exploring some truly amazing ideas with Dior’s incredible creative teams. That is what I love so much about Dior Lady Art: each project has a logic and a balance that allow it to achieve infinite precision.

I sent a drawing and a colour palette, and we worked together until we achieved very refined, precious tones and found the right colours through numerous trials and samples. I wanted [the colours] of a balcony in spring, with the beautiful flowers that delight us every time.

I thought of Marcel Proust and his novel In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, where he mentions that fashion is born from the need for change. The Lady Dior, like couture, accompanies the seasons, crossing eras and exalting nature’s cycles. Fashion, punctuated by numerous rituals, embraces this awareness of constant change and eternal return.

Behind this idea of seasons lies something much more fundamental: the celebration of renewal and change, which is wonderfully embodied by spring, the most magical season, with its flowers and their fragrances.

HB: To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this project, how does it feel to join the speciality Dior Lady Art artists community?

EJ: I discovered and followed the different editions of Dior Lady Art with great pleasure. When I had the chance to see the projects for real, and how the artist’s spirit and imagination unfold in this object, I understood that Dior Lady Art constituted, to a certain extent, a portrait of the artist: their way of thinking is embodied in this exceptional creation. It is therefore a great privilege for me to be part of this 10th edition.

HB: What was a special moment from this Dior Lady Art project that you will always remember?

EJ: What I love about fashion, and Dior, in particular, is this idea of a studio-laboratory, this profusion of possibilities, with attention to the smallest detail. To achieve elegance and harmony, a perfect balance. We undertook this in the spirit of a creative studio.

HB: Globally, the Dior Lady Art project highlights and celebrates craftsmanship, creativity and innovation. How does this project differ from your traditional body of work and artistic process?

EJ: There was a collective energy that allowed me to get as near as possible to what I wanted to achieve. A very fluid and diverse creative dialogue developed, during which a real emulation was forged with the house, enabling me to test several avenues, including a change of scale. I adapted to the micro format after having mainly worked on monumental pieces. The fruitful exchange with Dior led to finding the right size. It was very stimulating.

Discover the Dior Lady Art Project here.

This article originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR Australia/New Zealand. Buy your copy here.