Louis Vuitton & Yayoi Kusama go dotty

An exciting new collaboration between iconic fashion house Louis Vuitton and the mega-eccentric Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama explores ethereal themes in a playful way. We think the combination is just perfect. 

Since its creation in 1854, Louis Vuitton has maintained a close relation with the world of art. Strengthened by this tradition, which has been intensified under the artistic direction of Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton is happy to associate itself with the first retrospective dedicated to the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. This exhibition, which invites visitors to immerse themselves into the world of Kusama, has been travelling from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and will continue its journey to the Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum in New York City, next July 2012.

Louis Vuitton pays tribute to the exceptional artist for whom Marc Jacobs, Artistic Director of the House, has great admiration. A collection issued from the collaboration between Yayoi Kusama and Marc Jacobs will interpret the most emblematic artworks of Kusama. 

The starting points for this latest collaborative collection were obsession and seriality. The iconic Louis Vuitton leather goods, ready-to-wear, shoes, accessories, watches and jewellery became the supports for Kusama’s organic repetitive patterns. Treated in vigorous and hybrid colours, the polka dots cover the products infinitely, expressing the unlimited possibilities of playing with scales, colours and densities. When the “kusamesque” figure comes to life, the patterns ripple and lead the eye into a stroboscopic game.

No middle, no beginning and no end: this hallucinatory proliferation will also be relayed in the Louis Vuitton windows worldwide decorated with emblematic motifs: biomorphic shaped “nerves” sculptures for windows named “BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE”; flowers entitled “ETERNAL BLOOMING FLOWERS IN MY MIND” and especially red polka dots on white backgrounds, among which Kusama figures named “SELF-OBLITERATION” can be spotted. For the artist, who sees her life as “a dot lost among millions of other dots”, this collaboration will allow her to spread her polka dots infinitely across the world and convey her overarching message: “Love Forever”.

“It enables her to increase her audience and that of contemporary art in general,” concludes Marc Jacobs. “This is the task Louis Vuitton has always set itself.”