Yayoi Kusama made her mark on fashion history — one dot at a time.
The Japanese artist, who died at 97 on Aug. 14, may be best remembered in the art world for her Infinity Mirror Rooms and pumpkin sculptures. But fashion fans know her for a different magnum opus: her boundary-blurring partnership with Louis Vuitton.
The artist teamed with the French luxury house twice — first in 2012, then again in 2023 — turning the label’s monogram canvas and global boutiques into playgrounds for her signature spots.
The seed was planted in 2006, when then-creative director Marc Jacobs paid a visit to Kusama in Tokyo and she sent him home with an Ellipse bag she’d painted over with dots.
The first collaboration, called Dots Infinity, launched in tandem with the artist’s career retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and saw LV’s sunglasses, coats, shoes and totes covered in Kusama’s trademark print.
“The obsessive character and the innocence of her artwork touch me,” Jacobs said in a press release at the time. “She succeeds in sharing her vision of the world with us.”
The in-store rollout was an international spectacle, with many of the brand’s stores covered in spots inside and out, and a wax figure of the artist presiding over the windows of the Fifth Avenue flagship.
The second Kusama chapter, this time under artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière and then-executive vice president Delphine Arnault, was even bigger. Launched in January 2023, the 450-piece collection introduced a new technique that let Vuitton mimic the texture of the artist’s brushstrokes on leather and included pieces studded with metal half-spheres in a nod to her 1966 Venice Biennale piece “Narcissus Garden.”
The Speedy, Alma, Keepall and Neverfull styles all got Kusama makeovers. A pumpkin-shaped yellow bag — one of the collection’s holy grails — went on to fetch $151,200 at a Christie’s New York auction in 2024.
Louis Vuitton’s storefronts once again became viral destinations. A towering Kusama sculpture loomed over the Champs Élysées store, while a robot version of the artist painted dots in the window of a Manhattan boutique.
The blockbuster “Creating Infinity” campaign followed, shot by Steven Meisel and starring Bella Hadid, Gisele Bündchen and Justin Timberlake.
Hadid celebrated the campaign — her first for the house — on Instagram in 2023, telling followers the link to Kusama was particularly meaningful: “I connect with her deeply on healing mental struggles through artistic freedom and creation,” the model wrote.
Kusama was open about her lifelong challenges with mental health. The artist voluntarily checked into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital in 1977 and lived there for the rest of her life, painting daily from a studio down the road.
For Kusama, the fashion partnership was an extension of her practice. “Be it a sculpture or be it clothes, for me it is the same thing. It’s my creation,” she told WWD in 2012. “I don’t see any difference. It is part of my art.”
Louis Vuitton chairman and CEO Pietro Beccari paid tribute to the artist in a statement following her death, calling her “one of the greatest artists of contemporary art.”
“She shaped her life and work with extraordinary freedom, imagination, and vision, leaving an indelible mark on the art world over the past decades,” Beccari added. “Her influence on art and culture is immeasurable.”
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