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.
