Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series dedicated to the eighth edition of Dior Lady Art, hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this highly-anticipated edition, 12 artists from around the world were invited to transform the iconic Lady Dior handbag into a unique work of art. 

Bridging heritage and reinvention, New York-based Jeffrey Gibson dreams up multicolored works fusing traditional Native American craft techniques with a bold, almost psychedelic Pop aesthetic.

Influenced by his peripatetic childhood, the multimedia artist curates a mash-up of aesthetic references, ranging from queer aesthetics to fashion, while exploring the power of the spoken word through phrases that resonate with his world, celebrating the forgotten and the marginalized through the prism of art.

Adorned with patterned beadwork, partly inspired by the artist’s iconic punching bag series, and tagged with the phrase “I can do whatever I choose,” the Lady Dior takes on an object sculpturalness. Working with Dior’s petites-mains, Gibson used a mix of glass and beadwork of varying sizes to achieve different textures, offset with fluorescent neoprene and netting, while the handles are covered in rhinestones that give a Sixties vibe.

A second small-format version of the iconic bag is embroidered with a face, the artist’s emblem, with a stone for a nose, a 3D-printed shell mouth, and beaded eyes using elements from West Africa. The “D.I.O.R.” charms metamorphose into giant pixels, materializing the link between past and present.

An extension of his artistic universe, the Lady Dior in Gibson’s hands transforms into a multicolored totem for exploring the cultural realities of modern life, in a masterful mélange of narratives and references.

Tune in to the episode for a deep dive into his universe.

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series dedicated to the eighth edition of Dior Lady Art, hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this highly-anticipated edition, 12 artists from around the world were invited to transform the iconic Lady Dior handbag into a unique work of art.

In this episode, we enter the universe of London-based Canadian-Korean artist Zadie Xa, a transporting, enigmatic world informed by notions of self and Xa’s experiences within the Korean diaspora. Influences range from folklore, speculative fiction and systems of power to the supernatural, ancient religions and the climate crisis. For her multi-media installations, the artist often incorporates richly patterned garments, mixing streetwear codes with nods to ceremonial wear and ancestral traditions.

For Dior Lady Art, Xa dreamed up four bags featuring vibrant geometric patchworks inspired by pojagi, a traditional Korean wrapping cloth, as well as ornate mother-of-pearl applications that pay tribute to the ancient Korean handicraft of najeonchilgi. Rings of mother-of-pearl edged with flames give onto scenes depicting animals often found in her work, such as the fox, the orca and the seagull, here holding a small planet in its beak.  

Tune in to the episode to hear more about the artist’s colorful and layered Dior Lady Art creations.

Bienvenue dans la série de podcasts Dior Talks ayant pour thème la septième édition du Dior Lady Art et animée par la journaliste, basée à Paris, Katya Foreman. Pour l'événement de cette année, 11 artistes du monde entier se sont prêtés au jeu de la métamorphose en transformant l'iconique sac à main Lady Dior en une œuvre d'art unique.

Pour ce dernier épisode, nous plongeons dans l'univers de Françoise Pétrovitch pour découvrir son parcours d'artiste et les influences de son enfance passée à Chambéry, une ville alpine du sud de la France. "J'ai toujours considéré les beaux-arts comme une sorte de Graal, quelque chose d'extraordinaire. Mais je n'ai pas eu cette formation", explique l'artiste qui, depuis les années 1990, produit l'une des œuvres les plus puissantes de la scène artistique française.

Chez Françoise Pétrovitch, tout commence par un dessin, son univers s'étendant également à la céramique, aux lavis d'encre, au verre, à la peinture, à la gravure et à la vidéo. Les sujets abordés vont de la fragilité de la nature et du corps à l'intimité entre les personnes et aux raisons psychologiques qui peuvent nous rapprocher.

Pour ce projet, l'artiste a abordé le Lady Dior comme une sculpture, réinterprétant à l'encre le motif de cannage caractéristique du sac, et utilisant l'oiseau, symbole de liberté et de fragilité, comme un accent décoratif ludique, appliqué, par exemple, sur le cuir par une technique de sérigraphie, ou s’envolant sur des breloques pour ajouter un côté ludique et pop. 

La couleur se joue dans des diffusions en dégradé, comme des taches d'encre, ainsi que sur des doublures métalliques qui invitent à une réflexion sur l'intimité et l'intériorité.

" J'ai essayé de retrouver dans le cuir et l'imprimé la même qualité que celle que j'ai dans mes dessins. Donc ici, nous cherchions vraiment des juxtapositions de couleurs. C'était professionnel et en même temps très poétique, ce que j'adore", explique Pétrovitch.

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

In this episode we’ll be hearing from Qatari artist Bouthayna Al Muftah, a multidisciplinary artist whose universe centres on the collective memory of her country and the people who shaped it through oral history, song, poetry and folklore. The artist’s methods range from painting to photography, printmaking, photographic performance series and video as well as typographic work linked to archiving the past.

For her reinterpretation of the Lady Dior bag, Al Muftah, an alumna of the Virginia Commonwealth

University School of the Arts in Qatar who was tapped to design the Official Poster for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, explored the idea of a conceptual book taking shape. Chiffon is the dominant material, printed with Arabic typography using words from folkloric songs and poetry. 

“With my work I always talk about how we carry our memories with us, how we become our memories and how we wear them, as well as how relics carrying those stories can be passed down in families,” says the artist. “Here, the bag is also an object that is being passed down, that holds memories and carries them.”

Tune into the episode to learn more about this poetic Dior Lady Art journey from the artist herself.

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

Industrial wastelands, obsolete machines and anthropomorphic forms meet the slow art of tapestry weaving in the world of Paris-based Russian artist Zhenya Machneva, our latest guest. Using black and white drawings the artist embraces her painterly approach to colour as the works come to life on the loom. 

A graduate of the Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Machneva, who specializes in textiles, attributes her fascination with relics of desolate industrial landscapes to a visit to a factory where her grandfather worked for 40 years, where the machines resembled sculptures. Playing on geometric forms inspired by Brutalism, Modernism and Constructivism, this mood carries over to her three architectural Lady Dior bags which she conceived as sculptures, or art objects, positioned on metal structures. Being invited to reinterpret this iconic bag stirred a lot of questions on what it means to be a woman for the artist, with contrasting “soft and gentle” tapestry-inspired accents symbolizing a woman’s lifestyle and load. 

“These bags collect in themselves all of my fields of inspiration, from architecture to women’s lives,” says the artist who approached the project as a synthesis of art and design, experimenting with colour and composition to create something new.

Tune into the episode to learn more about her fascinating world. 

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

Drawing on his life experience growing up in a mixed-race family, universal representations of the human experience remain central to the work of rising Californian artist Alex Gardner.

“I really wanted to make this generic avatar of a person that is sans identity,” says the artist whose stylized figurative paintings portray androgynous, featureless Black subjects. 

Here, the artist chose to reinterpret his work ‘Malleability,’ depicting a hand pressing down on an ambiguous part of another figure. 

“I was thinking about how easy it is to manipulate and get in the heads and control the actions of people,” says Gardner. “Fashion, for instance, has a lot of influence on culture, and then for anyone who wears the bag, it’s the influence they may feel they have on the room.” 

Maintaining the bag’s silhouette and form, the artist, whose inspirations range from 16th century European art to movies, chose to experiment with materials. The bag’s lining is in a blazing shade of cadmium red and the exterior features a pearlescent, holographic molded leather suggesting draped fabric, while the body parts are in contrasting matte black velvet. 

Being approached to participate in Dior Lady Art proved a creative curveball for the artist who is hoping to do more functional objects and three-dimensional work.

Concludes Gardner: “It was actually the perfect timing to face the challenge of making this very cool art object, but also maintaining a lot of functionality because, at the end of the day, I do want people to be able to use it as a bag. So, that push and pull.”

Tune into the episode to learn more about the artist’s fascinating universe.  

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, and based in Brooklyn, New York, our latest guest, Sara Cwynar, is fascinated by the visual politics of popular images, how they infiltrate our consciousness, and how images and objects change in value over time. Themes range from feminism to consumer culture.

The self-taught artist started out working as a graphic designer for the New York Times Magazine, going on to graduate with an MFA in photography from Yale. Drawn to create art, she started out making works in her parents’ garage, creating compositions using sourced images and objects found in drawers or the local dollar store.

Kitsch is a recurring source of inspiration, drawing on everything from costumes worn as a competitive figure skater during her childhood to the theories of Roland Barthes and Milan Kundera, who in his seminal work, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” explores kitsch as something more sinister that takes on existential meaning.

Cwynar’s large red Lady Dior in quilted leather is covered in patches of images sourced from museum archives and art history books, interspersed with stock photos depicting everything from birds to lips, the latter revisited in a 3D print by the Dior team. “I wanted to make a kind of encyclopedic object, a mini history, that someone carries around on their arm,” says the artist. 

On a smaller bag in mustard yellow, photo patches are encapsulated in a second transparent skin forming the iconic ‘cannage’ pattern. Inside, the lining is covered in a picture of blue sky and clouds, with this idea that “You enter the bag and then you go into another world.” 

Tune into the episode to learn more about her fascinating world.

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

First approached to collaborate with Dior for the Art'N Dior exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in Shenzhen, Shanghai, in 2021, Wang Yuyang for this new intimate project revisiting the Lady Dior through his world explores his fascination with the moon. 

Using medium, small and mini formats, the bags feature recreations of the moon and the lunar surface using an array of traditional techniques and tactile effects including embroidery and inlay.

His five creations include a black Lady Dior with a white moon motif masterfully recreating the look of the artist’s installation ‘Artificial Moon,’ here reinterpreting the moon’s cold white light using bead and sequin embroidery made by the Dior petites mains. Using a 3D printing technique, a pink bag, meanwhile, features a colourful surface evoking lunar craters, playing on the roughness and unevenness of leather. For the latter, Wang donned digital glasses that render the colours in black and white, creating a random colour palette that the artist himself only got to discover upon removing them. 

Tune into the episode to hear more about his fascinating world. 

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

For this latest episode we plunge into the universe of Françoise Pétrovitch to learn about her artist journey and childhood influences growing up in Chambery, an alpine town in the south of France. “I always regarded fine arts as a kind of Holy Grail, something amazing. But I didn't have that training,” says the artist who since the 1990s has produced one of the most powerful bodies of work on the French art scene.

With Pétrovitch, it all starts with a drawing, with her universe also extending to ceramics, ink washes, glass, painting, print and video. Subjects range from the fragility of nature and the body to intimacy between people and the psychological reasons that may draw us together.

The artist for this project approached the Lady Dior as a sculpture, reinterpreting the bag’s signature cannage motif in ink, and using the bird, a symbol of freedom and fragility, as a playful decorative accent, applied using a screen-printing technique on leather, for instance, or blown up on charms to add a fun, pop edge. 

Colour plays out in gradient diffusions, like ink stains, as well as on metallic linings that invite a reflection on intimacy and interiority.

“I tried to find the same quality in leather and print that I have in my drawings. So there, we were really looking at colour juxtapositions. It was professional and at the same time very poetic, which I love,” says Pétrovitch.

Tune into the episode to learn more about her fascinating world. 

Welcome to the Dior Talks podcast series themed around the seventh edition of Dior Lady Art and hosted by Paris-based journalist Katya Foreman. For this year’s event, 11 artists from around the world have participated in a game of metamorphosis by rendering the iconic Lady Dior handbag as a unique piece of art.

Hanji paper, watercolor painting and calligraphy with all its rituals, including breathwork and “the power of the breath that goes through your brush,” are among the key influences of our latest guest artist, Minjung Kim, celebrating the joys of silence and simplicity. Using ink and paper, the South Korean artist with her delicately complex collage designs based on layered, overlapping compositions, creates spatial illusions. Kim, who works between Italy, France and America, moved to Milan to study art in the early Nineties. Western influences, from Lucio Fontana to the materials and compositions of the Arte Povera movement, infuse her work. Nature is another major inspiration for the artist who likes to work where she is able to “see green or the sky.” 

The artist has reinterpreted three of her works for Dior Lady Art. On one bag, blocks of coloured mink recreate the work ‘Story’ inspired by the artist’s library in Milan, also reinterpreted in a smaller embroidered crystal version. A white bag adorned with delicate silk organza pleats recalls ‘The Street,’ which captures the idea of looking down from a building onto a sea of paper umbrellas. ‘Red Mountains,’ meanwhile, is based on an ink and watercolor work created by the artist on Hanji paper. The piece was inspired by the tides and the sound of water but, once flipped upside down, evokes a mountain range. 

Myriad storylines and cultures interweave in a meeting of fashion and art. “The beautiful thing is, through art, we are connected spiritually without explaining it,” says the artist. “Surely, someone will take the bag and feel something different than with an industrially-made bag. I hope they can feel my spirit and love of nature.”

Tune into the episode to learn more about her fascinating world.