Jonathan Anderson invited American textile artist Sheila Hicks to give the Lady Dior bag a second life as a piece of wearable sculpture, and the result, the Lady Dior by Sheila Hicks, turns one of Dior’s most recognizable silhouettes into a study in color, texture and hand-tied craft.
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Cast in a deep, verdant green, the bag trades its usual cannage leather surface for a dense field of sculptural tassels, each one bound by hand in jewel-toned silk thread. The effect is closer to a textile relief than a conventional handbag, and that is precisely the point: Hicks has spent her career treating fiber as a sculptural medium, and this collaboration brings that sensibility directly onto the body of an icon.
A Bag Built Like a Sculpture, Not Just Covered in One
The construction starts from the Lady Dior’s familiar boxy frame, the same structured silhouette Christian Dior himself introduced and Princess Diana later made famous. Over that frame, artisans apply rows of tassels in graduated, jewel-bright silk shades, each tassel individually bound rather than printed, woven or machine-applied.
Because the tasseling is done by hand, no two surfaces read identically — small variations in tension and color placement give the bag a one-of-one quality that is rare in a house product built around repeatable codes. Inside that tasseled shell sits a second, softer object: a suede pouch nested within the exterior, creating a literal bag-within-a-bag. The pouch carries the everyday function — card slots, phone, keys — while the tasseled outer body does the talking.
Sheila Hicks’s Language, Translated Into Leather Goods
Hicks has spent more than six decades treating thread as a structural material rather than a decorative one, building everything from small woven studies to room-scale fiber installations shown in major museums. Her vocabulary draws on weaving traditions she encountered while traveling and studying across Latin America, North Africa and Asia, and her recurring fascination with color saturation and tactile density shows up clearly here: the tassels on this Lady Dior behave the way her textile works do, catching light differently depending on the angle and the density of thread.
This is also not her first encounter with the house. Dior previously staged her textile works alongside the Lady Dior under Maria Grazia Chiuri, which makes this collaboration with Anderson less a one-off stunt and more a continuation of a genuine, long-running dialogue between Hicks and the Maison.
Where It Fits Inside Dior’s Art-Bag Lineage
Since 2016, Dior has periodically handed the Lady Dior over to artists as a kind of canvas through its Lady Dior Art initiative, with past names including Faith Ringgold and Jeffrey Gibson. The Sheila Hicks version sits in that same tradition but reads differently in practice: it is not a limited capsule released alongside the bag’s seasonal line, it is presented as a savoir-faire moment in its own right, foregrounding the labor and technique behind the surface rather than treating the artist’s name as a marketing layer.
Unlike most Lady Dior Art pieces, this one is not a one-off sold on request. The Small Lady Dior in this tasseled construction carries a fixed retail price of $22,000 and comes in five confirmed colorways: red, two distinct beige tones, blue, and latte, each pairing a calfskin body with hand-applied silk and linen tassels. The deep green seen in Dior’s own savoir-faire imagery appears to be an additional or campaign-specific tone rather than one of the standard retail options, so anyone shopping for this exact piece should confirm color availability directly with a Dior client advisor or boutique. Every version ships with the brand’s signature dust bag and can be paired with Dior’s interchangeable embroidered straps, which lets the same bag move between a structured handheld silhouette and a more casual crossbody one.
For collectors and longtime Lady Dior owners, this is a good moment to think about how the bag is stored as much as how it is worn. Hand-applied tassels and a calfskin-and-linen body are vulnerable to crushing and shape loss when a bag sits empty on a shelf, which is exactly the kind of structural stress a bag pillow insert is designed to prevent.
