How Yayoi Kusama continues to influence fashion

From her radical happenings to working with Louis Vuitton, Yayoi Kusama’s work has long been tied with fashion.

Yayoi Kusama in her Infinity Mirror Room.

In 1969 Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama staged a fashion show. Well, of sorts.

Models promenaded down Fifth Ave, wearing her designs and gradually undressing. By the time they reached their destination at 57th Avenue they were completely naked. Indeed, they were displaying what a press release issued by Kusama described as “the Natural Look” and responding to “the natural urge decreed by the cosmic forces of planet Earth”. In the same year she established the Kusama Fashion Institute.

For Meg Slater, curator of international exhibition projects at the National Gallery of Victoria – which next week will open its blockbuster survey of the 95-year-old artist and sculptor’s work – the show is just one example of how fashion was an integral, and sometimes overlooked, part of Kusama’s work.

Examples of this include Kusama wearing dresses of her own design that match the environments she has created, and as Slater notes too, she used fashion to distinguish herself as an outsider, such as the silver kimonos she would wear to events. An early example is her (unauthorised) show at the 1966 Venice Biennale where she presented Narcissus Garden, where she stood selling off 1500 mirrored plastic spheres on the lawn outside of the Italian pavilion.

She was shortly asked to leave when authorities caught wind she was selling the pieces off as a critique of commercialism in the art world.

“It kind of marked her first foray into performance. And although she didn’t design, that we know of, the kimono she was wearing. I think it’s an interesting example of how she used fashion prior to designing it. She integrated it into her artwork,” says Slater.

The “high priestess of polka dots”, as Kusama referred to herself, often used fashion in her politically motivated “happenings” staged around New York City in this period of the ’60s where her work took a turn from painting and sculpture toward fashion and more ephemeral art practice based in performance.

Yayoi Kusama pictured in 1971. Picture: Thomas Haar

For a brief time during this period she also owned a fashion boutique in New York where she sold some of her almost exclusively unwearable, avant-garde clothes, many of them with strategic holes to reveals breasts, buttocks and genitalia. Some of them were even stocked in major department stores, though as Kusama said in a rare interview with the publication Art Space, “they only bought the more conservative styles. The radical vanguard items that I poured my energy into sold little in the end.”

Still, it must be said that the “orgy dress” with space for up to 25 wearers may well have had its uses. Also that Kusama’s concepts of radical, gender blurring designs – like much of her work, including the endlessly Instagrammed Infinity Mirror Rooms (debuted in 1965) – was ahead of her time.

“Something that I’ve noticed by reading about Kusama for so many years is that she is almost always consistently completely ahead of the curve in a really interesting way because while she may not have influenced someone like [Japanese fashion designer] Rei Kawakubo, she launched these designs that we would see in the years and decades to come, the central principles have become really core elements of different movements and design around the world,” says Slater.

Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden 1966 at the 33rd Venice Biennale.

The exhibition will include several of Kusama’s fashion designs from this period. Many of the pieces were remade by the artist in the ’90s and early 2000s, but are the same design.

Kusama often wore her own designs to her happenings, and as Slater notes too, integrated her fashion into her works – almost always wearing a dress, handmade by her with her own textiles, that matches her environment. Sometimes she would advertise her fashion designs in her own publications, such as the short-lived Kusama Presents an Orgy of Love, Sex, and Beauty (eight issues published in 1969).

“I think it’s important to say that fashion, and up until the present too, has been a very strong part of Kusama’s practice. Sometimes it’s been a little bit more front of mind and sort of expressed as a key medium that she’s working with, but I find it really interesting that she’s always found ways to integrate fashion into her practice,” Slater says.

“Because her work is innately personal. It’s about her own very singular experience. So it that makes sense to me that she would choose to visually tie herself to her work in that way.”

A look from the 2023 Yayoi Kusama Louis Vuitton collection.

Kusama’s influence on fashion is still felt today. The most obvious example is her collaboration with the world’s largest luxury brand, Louis Vuitton. The partnership started in 2012, when fashion designer Marc Jacobs was creative director. Last year a new collection with the artist was launched, with pieces that used key motifs of her work including Painted Dots, Metal Dots, Infinity Dots and Psychedelic Flowers.

Jacobs wrote in a Time piece honouring Kusama’s inclusion in the Time 100 Most Influential People List in 2016, “When people look back at her work decades from now they’ll see that her idea of creation and infinity has an eternal endurance”.

One of Yayoi Kusama’s avant-garde creations.

As Slater notes too, Kusama took this collaboration with the French luxury house as seriously as any of her other work.

A nod to the fact that her work defies categorisation and also her own extremely strong persona. As Slater points out, she is the third most searched artist in the world on price indexes after Picasso and Warhol. Meanwhile, a limited-edition Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama pumpkin bag sold at Christies in September for $US151,200 ($233,530) – the highest price ever for an LV bag.

“I think that she’s done a very good job of connecting her image to her artwork. She has a very strong visual brand – I mean the cropped red wig, the handmade dresses that bear the same motifs as the artworks that she is connecting them to. So she’s also always been very open to exploring other avenues. She’s not a purist in terms of ‘I only paint or I only sculpt’,” says Slater of her appeal to fashion brands, and those who wear them.

“I think that her openness to working with different creatives, whether it be a design company … or whether it be Louis Vuitton, she considers it all to be part of her artistic practice.

“She doesn’t consider it to be like a commercial avenue. She has actually described her shopfronts for Louis Vuitton as exhibitions. So I think it’s just incredibly open-minded, which has seen her just completely enter the public consciousness in a way that no other living artist has really done.”

Yayoi Kusama runs at the National Gallery of Victoria from December 15 to April 25, 2025.