To celebrate a decade of Dior Lady Art, the French maison has once again handed the reins to ten contemporary artists from around the world, giving them carte blanche to transform the iconic Lady Dior into a work of art. Among this year’s contributors is Kuwaiti visual artist Alymamah Rashed, whose deeply personal and poetic lens brings an ethereal, almost otherworldly transformation to the classic silhouette.
Originally introduced in 1995 and famously gifted to Princess Diana (hence the name), the Lady Dior has become synonymous with elegance, craftsmanship, and quiet power. Its cannage stitching, structured shape, and dangling charms are instantly recognizable. But in the hands of artists like Rashed, it becomes something more.
The artist’s contribution to the anniversary edition is strikingly distinct and unmistakably hers. One of her reimaginings features a lush explosion of sculptural pink floral forms blooming across the bag’s white body. It’s a visual garden, accented by golden hardware and soft mint-green handles in a surreal and sensory tribute to femininity, nature, and movement. The other bag, by contrast, leans into texture and materiality: a shimmering mosaic of pearls, embroidery, and beadwork that evokes ocean tides and desert mirages. A seashell swirl sits beneath the surface, almost like a memory, while the gold handles and signature Dior charms glisten like buried treasure.
This duality—earthly and cosmic, floral and aquatic—is core to Rashed’s practice. A graduate of Parsons School of Design (MFA) and the School of Visual Arts (BFA) in New York, she explores identity, regional folklore, and the body through a dreamlike visual language. Her work is rooted in Gulf iconography, personal mythologies, and the natural world, often filtered through a surrealist lens and her Lady Dior bags are no exception.
This isn’t Rashed’s first foray into luxury collaboration either. Earlier this year at Art Dubai 2025, she teamed up with Swiss watchmaker Piaget to create Your Love Moves Around My Trapeze Sun (Will You Hold Our Glistening Light?), a dazzling art piece inspired by the trapeze-shaped dial of Piaget’s new Sixtie Jewellery Watch Collection. Much like her Dior bags, the work was a meditation on rhythm, intimacy, and motion, which is a recurring theme in her oeuvre.
Launched in 2016 by Dior’s former creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Dior Lady Art project was conceived as a way to bridge fine art and fashion by inviting artists from across disciplines and geographies to reinterpret the Lady Dior through their own visual language. What started as a bold experiment in creative collaboration quickly became one of Dior’s most anticipated annual releases. Over the past decade, Dior Lady Art has featured artists like Zhang Huan, Mickalene Thomas, and Joana Vasconcelos, with each bag merging the maison’s signature craftsmanship with contemporary artistic expression.
The 10th edition of Lady Art brings together ten artists across disciplines and continents, including Marc Quinn, Lakwena, Ju Ting, and Lee Ufan, among others.
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