On Everything #146: What the $1,150 Dior’s Madame Bovary T-shirt Really Says

One task that must have occupied J.W. Anderson as he was taking over Dior was to create his version of the Dior woman. She could no longer be a feminist; Maria Grazia Chiuri, the brand’s previous creative director, owned that narrative; besides, the cultural tide had turned, and being political was no longer trendy. As evidenced by a series of bags and t-shirts with novel titles on them, Anderson decided that his Dior woman would be cultured. Like Chiuri’s luxury feminism, this would work for the simplistic image calculus that drives the contemporary luxury consumer (feminist=good, cultured=good). But she would not just be cultured, one imagines Anderson deciding; she would occupy the lofty heights of literature. And what rich girl, or one who wants to look rich, would not want to have intellectual prestige stamped with the imprimatur of luxury fashion’s second most famous house, a two-for-one sale that guaranteed her fashionability and bestowed on her an inner life?

Anderson, being a shrewd brand builder, eased the Dior client in with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a book she would most likely be familiar with, before whacking her with Ulysses, James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece of sublime impenetrability. Since there is likely no overlap in the Venn diagram that encompasses both a Dior customer and a reader of Ulysses, except in Anderson’s mind, he has sprinkled in other chic books. There is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (dark, titillating chic!), and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (not chic, but the author was!). (For the boys, Anderson took our advice and produced an A Clockwork Orange (edgy chic!) tote, which promptly sold out at $3,900 and now fetches $20,000 on Grailed.) Some of the books are French, just like Dior (wow!). There is Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (travel chic!). There are a couple of racy titles like Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire (subversive chic!), and Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos (naughty chic!). ( I am now waiting for a Marquis de Sade Justine tote, but that is probably wishful thinking.) And then there is Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, also racy, but not just that, as you will see.

Anderson’s Madame Bovary comes in a variety of flavors: a $3,300 cotton book tote, a $1,750 silk sweater, and my personal favorite, a $1,150 cotton t-shirt. Commodifying one’s intelligence is all fine and dandy, but as I looked at these goods, the plot of Madame Bovary came back to me, and I began to wonder whether Anderson, unwittingly or not, was making fun of his customers.