The Lotus Chandelier is probably one of the most whimsical and well-loved paper mache chandeliers we make. It is covered in little doodads, sprouting lights, curling petals, and all sorts of wonderful and weird details that make it feel pretty magical. Jane, the designer behind everything here at Stray Dog, says it is one of her favorite designs.
The story of the Lotus really goes back to pre-COVID, when Jane’s brother, who lives in New Orleans, was buying and showing off some lovely prints of old Mardi Gras float designs. Amazed by the detail and creativity in these old drawings, Jane, quite naturally, started digging.
She found sketches of corn people, dragonflies, lily pad lanterns, mushroom carriages, and all sorts of wonderfully strange things that clearly sprang from extraordinarily creative minds. She became especially interested in the work of Carlotta Bonnecaze, an artist we do not know a whole lot about, but whose old work can still be found tucked away in digital archives. There’s a great little substack post here about Carlotta Bonnecaze that goes more into depth about how “She’s credited as being the first woman, and the first Creole, to design Mardi Gras floats and costumes, primarily for Proteus, the second-oldest Mardi Gras krewe.”
Jane spent a lot of time gawking at these old float designs from the late 1800s, doing what she does best: getting inspired. Some of her biggest artistic inspirations include Elsa Schiaparelli, Josef Frank, and David Hockney, and you can certainly see that same sense of playfulness, color, fantasy, and a complete disdain for boring in the Lotus.
She told me that the first chandelier she ever designed and made was actually for a costume party. “I went as a chandelier, in a crystal drop-adorned vintage dress and a headpiece made out of paper mache. I wish I could find those photos.” Apparently, the costume was based on a photograph from the 1920s of the grandmother of her good friend, Guadalupe. Which feels pretty fitting, because so much of what we make comes from that wonderful human tendency to look backward in time, find something that delights us, and make it our own.
As Jane started flipping through those old Mardi Gras float drawings, you could practically see the wheels turning. “Maybe I’ll do a whole line of Mardi Gras floats,” she said. Our Lotus Chandelier is made from an iron base and paper mache, all finished by our artisans in San Miguel de Allende. It is wonderful, it is completely over the top, and in Jane’s words, it is simply “elaborate and great.”
But if you’d like to purchase yours from China, we found an interpretation of the Lotus on a website via the internet!! They seem to have cleverly read our website description and created an “inspired” version called the Mardi Gras Blossom Chandelier. We find this pretty hilarious.
Anyhoo, the Lotus is one of those pieces that makes us very happy to have in our line, and we appreciate knowing others love this wonderfully whimsical chandelier as much as we do.
