The Lady Must TRAVEL

Art and the fashion business make strange bedfellows, but Dior has taken the complex relationship to a whole new level. By Sunitha Thayaparan.

from filmmaker David Lynch and fashion photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin to Swiss socialite and artist, Olympia Scarry. The bag is researched, played with, analysed, and interpreted through a host of media and materials (think photography, installations, film et al.) until you are forced to engage with it beyond the confines of its intended use and certainly beyond the House of Dior.

The exhibition, which made its debut in Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011, travelled to both Beijing and Tokyo and even Milan’s Triennale Design Museum before hitting Hong Kong. Eighty artists, photographers, and filmmakers banded to lend their artistic interpretation of the Lady Dior, and the mainstay was permutations of the bag as object, in which a variety of artists toyed with ideas and materials that resulted in a visual smorgasbord. Scarry’s frosted glass take where the sides are ripped out and frozen mid-air is particularly arresting.

But what really resonates is the photography, some of which were rather transgressive and most provocative. “Red Rope”, Wing Shya’s startling representation of a woman tied-up from behind, the cannage reflected in her bonds, vulnerably holding a Lady Dior in her hands as she tentatively turns, is rather haunting. Then there is Peter Lindbergh’s stylistic representation of the model Daria Werbowy as she seemingly stumbles out of a bar in Hicktown, Nowhere, brewski in one hand, Lady Dior in the other, covering

Peter Lindbergh’s shot of Daria Werbowy, as exhibited at ‘ Lady Dior As Seen By’

Kum Chi Keung’s “Lady Bird” was inspired by the art of birdcage-making

Pier 4 in Central, Hong Kong with the exhibition space designed as a Lady Dior bag