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In the biggest collaboration on which she has ever embarked, Japanese visual artist Yayoi Kusama, the empress of infinity art, is sending Louis Vuitton’s world totally dotty. It is a vertiginously pop-esque two-act* pas de deux that further cements the longstanding relationship between fashion and art.
Yayoi Kusama, 93, is what you would call a cult artist. Her iconic little girl look, comprising a trademark red wig and dresses meticulously hand-picked to match her creations, appears to have sprung from the pages of a hallucinogenic fairy tale, something for which she is idolised just as much as she is respected for her work. Work that is, indeed, regularly exhibited in some of the best-known museums worldwide.
Kusama is renowned for her polka dot-drenched installations, her organic undulations and her infinity mirrors that whisk spectators off on a dizzying and mind-bending journey. The latest string to the appropriately named Princess of Polka Dots’ bow? An XXL collaboration with the Louis Vuitton brand. It all began with a trunk that the artist emblazoned with her iconic painted dots and then presented to the trunk-maker to celebrate their inaugural collaboration. That was back in 2012. It was a masterpiece, and one that sparked Louis Vuitton’s desire to push the boundaries of the firm’s artisan expertise still further by working hand-in-glove with the artist, this time giving Yayoi Kusama free reign to sprinkle her creative genius across all of the brand’s different products: bags, women’s and men’s fashion, shoes, sunglasses, jewellery and even fragrances, some of which nestle in a mini trunk that appears to have been directly inspired by the one gifted by the artist. This riotous and quirky collaboration is set to be revealed in two tantalising acts, firstly in January and then on March 31, each time set in immersive environments created by the artist herself in a dizzying mise en abyme. The collection features almost all of Kusama’s most cherished symbols, including her Painted and Infinity Dots, her mirrored spheres, her psychedelic flowers and her Infinity Nets, in a kind of retrospective showcased through fashion that sees spots, her motif of predilection, proudly take centre stage.
Understanding the artist’s polka dot obsession requires us to turn the clock back to her childhood, a time when she experienced her first-ever brush with the world of fashion. Born in 1929 into the highly traditional world of Japan, Kusama found herself haunted by hallucinations as a child. At the age of 10, after gazing at a red flower design on a tablecloth, it was as though the pattern became engraved on her retina, appearing wherever her gaze came to fall – first on the ceiling, then on the walls and floor and eventually all over her own body. The red flowers exploded into blobs, which in turn became polka dots. The very same polka dots that now run riot across her creations, soft sculptures, paintings and walls, to the point of swallowing the onlooker up, with her repeating the motif ad infinitum as though to re-stake her claim on a world over which she has no control. Art as the only viable way of healing her mental wounds. When she was 28, Kusama headed overseas to try her luck in the USA. Having set up home in New York, she embarked on wild performance after wild performance, making bold social statements each time. One particular happening saw naked spot-emblazoned dancers take to the streets brandishing placards in their hands to voice her opposition to the war and champion sexual liberation. It was whilst in Manhattan that the woman who had been making her own outfits ever since she was a teen first decided to start using clothing to express her art. She set up her own eponymous brand, Kusama Fashion, announcing its launch with an impertinent press release: ‘Why look like other people? Buck the establishment! Haven’t you a personality? Express it!’
‘Back then, fashion and art were two totally different genres, but I never distinguished between the two,’ she later went on to say. ‘Fashion provided a way of exploring new spheres.’ Her inaugural collection was an extravaganza of spot-covered trousers and psychedelic dresses that she herself sported during her iconoclastic performances. Working out of her Greenwich loft, she drew, cut, sewed and assembled, surrounding herself with industry professionals who helped her commercialise several collections that used textiles as a canvas for expressing her 1960 ‘self- obliteration’ manifesto, in which she declared ‘my life is a dot lost among thousands of other dots.’ Little by little, her style grew increasingly daring, with her clothing designs making use of transparent materials or strategically placed holes to offer a glimpse of the wearer’s breasts, genitalia or buttocks, sending shockwaves through puritan America. Mentally exhausted by her obsessions, the artist eventually returned to Japan in 1973, admitting herself to a psychiatric hospital four years later. It was there that she found the safe space she needed to continue working frenetically each day from her workshop a short distance away.
Today, she continues to remain faithful to symbolism in her art, using the infinite repetition of motifs as a symbol of harmony and peace. And her desire to spread her message far and wide remains as strong as ever. When discussing her collaboration with Louis Vuitton, she said ‘I see this as an opportunity to share my way of thinking and my artistic philosophy with one and all.’ To guarantee the collaboration’s success, Louis Vuitton has worked closely with the artist’s inner circle, getting every single desiderata signed off by Kusama. That meant finding the perfect hues, which needed to be exactly the same as those used by the visual artist herself – sometimes it took no fewer than ten attempts to achieve Kusama blue! And then there were the spots, which needed to be positioned with military precision – a precision by no means dissimilar to that with which the Vuitton brand arranges the monograms on its designs. Reproducing the texture and shine of the artist’s ‘dot paintings’ on the bags and pouches was yet another challenge the brand faced. As was hand-crimping each of the half-spheres that adorn the Capucine and Cannes bags along with the biker jackets and the metallic dresses in the overtly futuristic ‘Metal dots’ range. It is a range that is reminiscent of one of the artist’s most sensationalistic actions. Back in 1966, in response to her non-invitation to the Venice Biennale, she tipped over a thousand mirrored orbs into the Serenissima canals, naming her work ‘Narcissus Garden’. Kusama even began peddling the orbs for 2 dollars a time to anyone who happened to pass by, but the police soon brought down the curtain on that particular show! Her audacity, however, paid off: 27 years later, having built up a huge following at the end of the 1980s, not only did she finally get to represent her country at the art world’s most prominent event, but she was also the first-ever woman to exhibit solo in the Japan pavilion.
Today more than ever, art is fashion and fashion is art. A marriage of love – and convenience – that has been growing ever-stronger since the new millennium dawned. But if we cast our minds back to the first strokes of genius from Stephan Sprouse, Murakami and Richard Prince, who were all invited by Marc Jacobs to send shockwaves through the monogram, links between artists and fashion are by no means anything new. At Vuitton, artistic collaborations initially began almost a century ago when aesthete Gaston-Louis Vuitton, the founder’s grandson, started commissioning artists to produce artwork for the Louis Vuitton stores. But it was Paul Poiret who first got the ball rolling a few years prior to that, with Picasso even inviting writer and collector Gertrude Stein to join him in the master couturier’s showroom store in 1916. It was an address that was overflowing with avant-garde creations and was well known by the designers of the time.
Poiret had his sights firmly set on building bridges between the worlds of art and fashion, and became one of the very first couturiers to collaborate with artists, including the likes of Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Brancusi, Picasso and Dufy. His young admirer, Elsa Schiaparelli, meanwhile, designed clothing for her Surrealist friends, and notably Dali, with whom she famously collaborated to create a shoe hat and the now-iconic lobster dress. Her designs were lauded in the press at the time, with a 1932 edition of the New Yorker claiming ‘a Schiaparelli dress is a real modern painting.’ A few years later, fervent art enthusiast and collector Yves Saint Laurent started looking to iconic paintings for inspiration, with artwork inspiring his Mondrian dress in 1965 – which helped propel the Dutch artist onto a global stage –, his Romane blouse, an interpretation of Henri Matisse’s eponymous canvas, and his dazzling jackets embroidered by Maison Lesage in the 1980s, which he emblazoned with his own take on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Irises. During that same period, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac invited his artist friends Hervé di Rosa, Gérard Garouste, Jean-Charles Blais and Ben to paint directly onto white tunics, creating wearable art. Thanks to the new collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Louis Vuitton, this creative and vertiginous pas de deux is set to continue, which is great news for all concerned.
*Act 1 was unveiled on January 1, 2023 in China and Japan, before going global on January 6. Act 2 will be unveiled on March 31.
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