Louis Vuitton and Kusama collaboration
Louis Vuitton’s new collection with Yayoi Kusama, includes an extensive range of shoes, bags, dresses, and scarves, all reflecting Kusama’s distinctive aesthetic.
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of mediums, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.
Both the collaboration Vuitton’s most extensive with an artist ever – and the fashion house’s sponsorship of Kusama’s retrospective art show at the Whitney (which has also been seen in Madrid, in Paris, and at the Tate Modern in London) came out of that meeting of the obsessive minds back in 2006.
“Marc Jacobs’s sincere attitude towards art is the same as my own,” Kusama told the Cut from her studio in Tokyo recently. “I respect him as a wonderful designer. Louis Vuitton understands and appreciates the nature of my art. Therefore there isn’t much difference from my process of making fashion.”
The starting points for the 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. All over, express 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 background 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 message: “Love Forever”. “It enables her to increase her audience and that of contemporary art in general, concludes Marc Jacobs. The task Louis Vuitton has always set itself.”
The first global window installation in the flagship in New York City, will be followed by similar installations in all 453 Louis Vuitton stores worldwide.
Source: NY Magazine.com
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