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The day artist Morgane Tschiember turned a Lady Dior bag into an erotic object
For the third installment of Dior Lady Art in 2020, under the impetus of Dior’s former artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, eleven female artists from around the globe revamped the Lady Dior bag, the house’s iconic accessory. Numéro takes a closer look at French artist Morgane Tschiember’s creation, which drew inspiration from shibari, the erotic art of Japanese bondage.
Published on 3 September 2020. Updated on 2 July 2026.
The infamous Lady Dior bag was first gifted to Lady Diana by former first lady Bernadette Chirac in 1995. In 2000, Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of the house of Dior at the time, gave free rein to eleven women artists from around the world, to reinvent the legendary accessory. Each one of them revamped its shape and used different materials, fabrics and colours of the iconic piece. This is the third time Dior has invited artists to metamorphose its flagship bag.
As a symbol of elegance and Parisian glamour, the understated, geometric shape of the Lady Dior bag, now an object of art, inspires artists. French sculptor, painter, photographer and video-maker, Morgane Tschiember, decided to entwine the bag in a cell made from ropes. A direct reference to the Japanese ancestral art of shibari, a sexual practice that restricts one or more partners by tying them up with thin ropes.
“Shibari is a series of works that I am endlessly developing in art and design,” the artist explains. “My Lady Dior bag takes on the technique of knots, used by Japanese samurais. They would tie up their enemies with a rope. The system of knots they’d developed meant, in the case of exchanging people, they could leave the enemy far away from them, pull a cord and then all the knots would come undone. The enemy could get away, and they could have someone from their clan back in exchange.”
