Lady Dior

The Lady Dior is a small, rigid, square handbag. Its leather is stitched all over in cannage, a lattice of diamonds that makes the surface rise in soft cushions. Two arched handles are fixed to the top with rings, and from one of them hang four gilt letters, D, I, O and R, which knock together as the bag is carried. Wikipedia counts 144 separate pieces in its construction. In black lambskin with pale gold metal it is the version most often seen. It is also the colour Diana was given.

The cannage comes from the Napoleon III cane chairs on which Christian Dior seated guests at his shows on the avenue Montaigne, but the bag itself belongs to the 1990s. In 1995 Bernadette Chirac, looking for a present for Diana, Princess of Wales, was offered a model Dior's staff called Chouchou, a favourite. Diana received it in black leather at the opening of the Cézanne exhibition at the Grand Palais, and carried it on official visits to Birmingham and Argentina.

Her use of it did the rest. The bag was renamed Lady Dior in her honour and went into larger production, and by one account 200,000 were sold in two years, multiplying the house's leather-goods business tenfold. Carla Bruni appeared with it in advertisements in the late 1990s; from 2008 Marion Cotillard starred in a run of short films made around it by directors including David Lynch.

The bag has since been made in many sizes and in materials from satin to crocodile, and in 2025 Jonathan Anderson showed a new version of it. The classic remains on sale beside these variations. The V&A holds a black lambskin example made in 2020, and in 2026 Dior listed the medium size, 24 centimetres high, in black cannage lambskin with a removable shoulder strap, made in Italy, at £5,300.