Shakuntala Kulkarni’s Of Bodies, Armour and Cages – Dior (2024–2025) extends her long-standing practice of sculpting cane into wearable armatures that protect, restrain, and transform the body. For Dior’s Autumn/Winter 2024–25 show in Paris, she created a large-scale installation in the Jardin des Tuileries, combining cane structures with photographs, printed canvas, and video excerpts of performances in Mumbai. The result was not just a set, but a complete environment — where fashion, sculpture, and performance coexisted.

Materiality drives the work. Cane, a flexible and domestic material, is bent into forms that echo armor yet resemble cages. The paradox is deliberate: these structures are delicate and lightweight, but they restrict movement, collapsing protection and confinement into one.

Scale is lived. The pieces are made to be worn, extending the body into fragile architecture. Inhabiting them transforms the wearer into a hybrid of person and structure, collapsing distinctions between garment and building.

Representation is layered. Kulkarni’s focus on the female body in public space highlights how identity is socially constructed: both vulnerable and defended, both visible and confined.

In Gesamtkunstwerk terms, the project dissolves disciplinary boundaries. It is sculpture that functions as clothing, fashion that acts as architecture, performance that operates as critique. At Dior, it staged not only garments but questions: how bodies occupy space, how structures shape identity, and how design can be both aesthetic and political.