Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Stars in Dior’s Lady 95.22 Handbag Campaign

January 13, 2023January 16, 2023 Empire

Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was recently featured in French luxury fashion house, Dior’s latest handbag campaign, tagged The Lady 95.22.

‘The Lady 95.22’ is dedicated to a new variation of the classic Lady Dior bag popularised by Diana, Princess of Wales.

The Lady 95.22 made its debut at the fashion house’s Fall/Winter 2022-2023 ready-to-wear show. Its unique name references the year of its creation (1995) as well as the year of its revival (2022). This new bag offers a contemporary reinvention of the iconic lines of the Lady Dior, with its Macro and Maxicannage motifs, soft curves and signature charms.

The bag launched on January 12th with a global campaign featuring a cast of exceptional women from the realms of art, cinema, sports, literature, fashion, and music. The first chapter lensed celebrated French photographer Brigitte Lacombe stars Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Beatrice Borromeo, and Anya Taylor-Joy in a series of black and white portraits.

In the campaign visuals, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie posed in a black pantsuit paired with a white T-shirt emblazoned with We Should All Be Feminists, which references one of her more famous works and first collaboration with the fashion house.

Giving her speech in the campaign video, Chimamanda said,

“I feel happiest when I am surrounded by the people I love—by my family, by my friends. I think I just light up.I think femininity and feminism have often been seen as mutually exclusive.

And so, I think for a long time, people felt that being a feminist meant somehow rejecting everything to do with feminity. Right so, you have to in some ways, kind of appropriate a man to be a feminist, and I don’t think so at all. I think that femininity and feminism actually complement each other. Women should be allowed to have a broad range of what they can be, who they can be, of how they can present themselves. And so I think femininity is one of those options and I love femininity.”

Talking about the bag, she continues:

“There’s something almost timeless about the bag. I think it would be interesting to juxtapose that with a less timeless outfit – a lot of colour, a lot clashing, a lot of maximalism and then the bag. Its beauty is not rooted in any particular period. Timelessness means that it cuts across cultures. It doesn’t matter where one is looking at a beautiful timeless thing, one finds it. One of the motos I like to live by is, never admire quietly. If I admire something about somebody, I think it’s important to tell them. We humans are so fragile and it’s important to give people their flowers while they’re here. So never admire quietly”.