It feels only yesterday since Louis Vuitton launched the first collaboration with Yayoi Kusama. Fashion fans who like art, will definitely remember how, in 2012, Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton created a capsule collection inspired by Kusama that was celebrated at the time by window installations featuring artworks by the Japanese artist, but also mini dolls and a life-size wax figure of the artist, obviously lost in a sea of dots.
That was probably among the most successful art and fashion collaborations ever made, so successful indeed, that Louis Vuitton decided to launch a new one with a first drop of products in January next year.
Some of the pieces in the collection, such as the polka-dot handbags, were showcased in May during the women's cruise 2023 show by Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand's artistic director.
Other designs, including leather bags and canvas bags covered in Kusama's colourful and irregular dots reproduced by hand by Vuitton's teams (for those wealthy enough to buy them there are also 40 hard-sided Champagne trunks customized by Kusama's studios that come at 400,000 euros each, practically as much as a work of art...) and a silk square printed with the artist's trademark "infinity dots" and a pumpkin.
In Kusama's world, polka dots are linked with obsessions and hallucinations, but she also tried to give them positive meanings, stating they are an allegory of the human condition.
"The polka dot has the form of the sun representing masculine energy, the source of life. The polka dot has the form of the moon representing the feminine principle of reproduction and growth. Polka dots must always multiply to infinity. Our earth is only one polka dot among millions of others," the artist once stated, flattening out differences and uniting diverse bodies, objects and surfaces through her visually striking motifs.
In a way, Kusama's words reveal us what makes polka dots a trend that stands the test of times: polka dots do have the power of destabilising the establishment in an obsessively playful way, while representing at the same time togetherness and unity.
Talking about destabilising the establishment, actually, the most striking thing about this polka dotted collaboration is the campaign: at the beginning of December, Louis Vuitton celebrated the collaboration with a 3D anamorphic billboard display outside of Shinjuku station's east exit in Tokyo.
In the animation, a polka-dotted LV Damier trunk opened up to reveal two pumpkins by Kusama, animated to resemble an alien vegetable with octopus-like tentacles. Kusama, wearing as a helmet the yellow pumpkin installed on the art island of Naoshima, popped up between the two pumpkins, peering over the ledge. The animations then showed the metallic spheres from her "Narcissus Garden" artwork and other polka-dotted inspirations.
Obviously the billboard went down a storm on Instagram where it got more than 10 million views, but there are other polka-dotted installations to check out involving landmarks such as the Tokyo Tower and Zojoji Temple, that also feature augmented reality activations.
The campaign makes you ponder about the ways the fashion and art collaboration developed in the last 10 years in general and how the campaigns, went from static to dynamic. When Jacobs and Kusama worked on the first collection for Vuitton, the brand mainly came up with colourful windows, but Kusama's wax replica, was static, almost lifeless.
Now we have an amazing degree of fluidity with Kusama actually moving and seemingly interacting with people in the anamorphic billboard (so, if you're a student working on a dissertation about adverts investigate this point - static Vs fluid/dynamic campaigns).
A second drop of products is scheduled for March 31 and will be backed by another ad campaign still under wraps that, hopefully, will be as imaginative and inspired by Kusama’s immersive worlds as this one. In the meantime, there are Kusama's pumpkin-shaped helmet filters for Instagram and Snapchat to try on. Who needs a handbag when you can have instant fun with an arty twist?
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