Every season, Dior’s Lady Art Project hands over its prim-and-proper icon—the Lady Dior bag—to a roster of the world’s coolest artists, who put their unique stamp on it. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, the initiative fittingly brings together 10 global talents. Among these are French artist Eva Jospin, who designed the show set for Dior’s fall/winter 2021-22 haute couture collection embroidered by the Chanakya School of Craft; Britain’s Marc Quinn, one of the inaugural artists of the Lady Art Project back in 2016; Haitian-American Patrick Eugène; and Kuwaiti painter Alymamah Rashed.
But the one that takes the cake—or really, the candy—this season is Ju Ting’s medium Lady Dior. The Beijing-based artist, known for fusing painting and sculpture through vibrant layers and tactile surfaces, brings her saturated colour palette and signature folds and cracks to the icon. Her sculptural painting style appears here in the rippling printed calfskin leather frills—each individually cut and meticulously assembled to form a hypnotic wavelike 3D surface on the bag that seems to shimmer and shift as you move.
The finishing touches double down on the fun: the silver handles and the letter charms that spell ‘Dior’ are puffed up with a balloon-like buoyancy. It’s tactile, sculptural, and entirely unserious in the best possible way—a collector’s trophy for the archives and the arm.
