Yayoi - Harper's BAZAAR

Yayoi Kusama splatters her hypnotic polka dots across new collections for Louis Vuitton

The polka dots appeared in a vision when she was 10. Yayoi Kusama grew up in Matsumoto, Nagano, at the foot of the Japanese alps — a prefecture famous for its 16th-century castle and as the host of the 1998 Winter Olympic Games. But back in 1939, little Yayoi was plagued by hallucinations and obsessive tendencies. To deal with them, she began painting endless polka dots, which, she has explained, represent infinity.

At 29, Yayoi managed to escape from Japan to the United States — with the help of modernist artist Georgia O’Keefe — where her next seemingly impossible obstacle was the male-dominated New York art world. Nevertheless, she persisted; today, her work is among the most instantly recognisable in the world.

Louis Vuitton — a maison with a penchant for artistic collaborations — came calling in 2012. Since 1988, Sol LeWitt, Sylvie Fleury, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons have all been invited to apply their signatures to the brand’s pieces. Yayoi’s first collaboration with the brand was a meeting of two signatures: her hand-painted polka dots on the maison’s emblematic trunk, the first iteration of which was produced in 1858.

A decade later, Yayoi and Louis Vuitton picked up where they left off. The new incarnation features Yayoi’s artworks across all Louis Vuitton product categories — including ready-to-wear, accessories and fragrance — divided into four collections and released in two highly anticipated drops (one was in early January; the second will be on March 31). The collections include Painted Dots, Metal Dots, Infinity Dots and Psychedelic Flower, the latter of which explores Yayoi’s secondary obsession with florals. Yayoi painstakingly presided over each polka dot — ensuring the brushstrokes maintained their scale, moving them millimetre by millimetre.

In a combined statement, Yayoi and Louis Vuitton explained that they are equally “engaged in and recognise each other through … the making of magical objects that transcend space and time”. They want the person who possesses one of these pieces to “feel the care and emotional investment it took to make them; to become part of their story and one that will hopefully become part of the story of future generations — stretching to infinity.” 

This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.