Yayoi Kusama and Louis Vuitton: after ten years, an exciting new collaboration

Ten years have passed since the visionary and hypnotic art of Yayoi Kusama seduced Louis Vuitton‘s design, turning the collaboration between the Japanese artist and the French fashion house into one of the most successful ever.

Indeed, Vuitton has always cultivated close ties with the art world: collaborating with famous artists who, with their imagination, have created some of the brand’s most emblematic creations. A few names? Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Urs Fisher, to name a few. Kusama’s is precisely a throwback: born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, she is still considered, at 93 years old, one of the most multifaceted and avant-garde representatives of contemporary art.

Her creativity was expressed through various forms: installations, sculptures, videos, paintings, photographs and, indeed, fashion. Cryptic and introverted, her colorful, playful and catalyzing art is the opposite of what her life has been about. Some of her most celebrated masterpieces, in fact, are the result of the strong hallucinations she always suffered from, of inner fears and anxieties. Art has been a true form of salvific escape for her: a way to affirm her identity and express herself with the outside world.

After Marc Jacobs now it is the new creative director Nicolas Ghesquière who unveils the collection of bags made precisely with the artist to whom Vuitton, just a decade ago, decided to link its stylistic destiny. The bags, ranging from classic to brand new models, feature a reinterpretation of one of Yayoi Kusama’s most famous motifs: the obsessive polka dot.

The Cruise, just unveiled in San Diego, is just a preview of the immediate future because, they let the headquarters know, from January 2023, the collaboration with the artist will transversally involve all categories of the maison. We look forward to admiring also in the Bologna boutique this new frontier that combines art and fashion in the name of creativity.