Yayoi Kusama, who died this week at 97, leaves behind one of fashion's most extensively documented artist collaborations — and it began with an object that was never supposed to look the way she made it look.
In 2006, Marc Jacobs, then Louis Vuitton's creative director, visited Kusama at her studio in Tokyo. According to reporting on the collaboration's history from WWD and other fashion trade outlets, Kusama presented him with a Louis Vuitton Ellipse bag she had altered herself, painting her signature polka dots directly across the house's monogram canvas. The gesture inverted the usual direction of a luxury collaboration: rather than a brand commissioning an artist's imagery, an artist had already taken the brand's own product and rewritten it in her own visual language before any deal existed.
That meeting set in motion a relationship that would eventually span two major collections and some of the most elaborate retail campaigns in recent luxury history. The first full Kusama x Louis Vuitton collection arrived in 2012, moving her dots across handbags, ready-to-wear and accessories. What made the pairing work, according to coverage at the time, was that neither identity was diminished by the other. A Vuitton bag remained legible as a Vuitton bag. Kusama's dots remained legible as Kusama's dots. The collaboration was built on that collision rather than on one house's imagery absorbing the other's.
More than a decade later, Louis Vuitton and Kusama reunited for a second, larger collaboration in 2023, extending the partnership across ready-to-wear, leather goods, accessories and fragrance, alongside large-scale store installations. Sculptures depicting Kusama with a paintbrush appeared on Vuitton locations in multiple cities, and windows and interiors were reworked entirely around her dot motif, blurring the line between advertising and installation.
Louis Vuitton's chairman and chief executive, Delphine Arnault, has been widely quoted describing the pairing's logic in simple terms: Kusama had an obsession with the dot, while Louis Vuitton had an obsession with the monogram. Both are repeated symbols capable of covering nearly any surface, and both had already built enormous individual recognition before they were combined — which is part of why the partnership read as complementary rather than as one brand borrowing another's imagery.
A look back at late Yayoi Kusama's polka-dotted, wonder-filled world for Louis Vuitton https://t.co/fnkwBdLRCB pic.twitter.com/jc3cRpHbN1
— New York Post (@nypost) August 27, 2026
Reporting on the collaborations has also emphasized that Kusama remained directly involved in how her work was translated into Vuitton's products and installations, rather than simply licensing her name to a design team. That detail connects the 2023 collection back to the same instinct behind the 2006 gift: Kusama treating an existing object as raw material for her own visual language, not as a surface waiting for someone else's design.
With her death now confirmed, the hand-painted Ellipse bag stands as the clearest starting point for a fashion legacy that would eventually reach store facades and museum collections alike. A single altered handbag became a full collection, then a second, then an entire retail campaign built around one artist's most enduring symbol.
