Connect the Dots

More than a decade after her first collaboration with Louis Vuitton, Yayoi Kusama is still obsessed with art —just as the fashion world is obsessed with her. The priestess of polka dots shares why her second meeting with the maison is a full circle moment

- Pameyla Cambe

In another universe, one where Yayoi Kusama is not an artist with a prolific, seven-decade career and sell-out art shows around the world, the Japanese nonagenarian would have certainly been a fashion designer.

Her label, Kusama Fashion Company, would sell dresses covered in her signature polka dots or, even more daringly, holes that exposed their wearer’s breasts or buttocks. And today, when cut-out clothes are less of a shock than they would have been to the average, mink-coated Bloomingdale’s customer 60 years ago, Kusama would be a fashion star.

As it turned out, Kusama still became a fashion star—but her story played out differently. She debuted Kusama Fashion Company during her stint in New York in the late 1960s, and her radical designs even warranted their own “Kusama corner” at leading department stores in the city, but they proved too provocative.

“At that time, fashion and art were two completely different genres in general, but I have never made a distinction between them. I don’t think of them as separate, because that way I can explore new fields,” shares the artist, who shuttered Kusama Fashion Company when she moved back to Japan in 1973. Since 1977, she has been voluntarily living in a mental health facility in Tokyo, where she continues to work as an artist and even make her own clothes.