Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is the fearless woman artist and style icon forever on our minds. Born in 1929, her art is composed of paintings, collages, soft sculptures, performance art and environmental installations. Yes, it’s true, she’s an unconventional style icon, falling into the category of timeless creatives rather than those more directly connected to fashion. However, she was even involved in fashion (more on that later), but the information is hard to find. Repetition, pattern, and accumulation comprise obsession and result in the overall effect of Kusama’s extravagant conceptual art.
The polka-dot was reborn under her name, and flourished to be a theoretic object of meaning.
“A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement… Polka-dots are a way to infinity,” she once said.
Mirroring her art, polka dots are Kusama’s wardrobe pièce de résistance. When she began her career in the 1960s, she often staged performance art pieces wearing nothing more than large polka dot stickers.
In the 60s, she also started her own fashion line, which was sold at Bloomingdale’s in New York – think evening dresses with holes cut in the breast and rear areas. She has created a look as powerful and recognizable as her artwork itself, now, in her old age, sporting a neon red wig in addition to her polka dot tops and dresses. “It suits very well the fashion that I create and wear and is an extension of this,” she told New York Magazine in 2012.
Her work within the fashion industry also holds her in high regard; her 2012 collaboration with Louis Vuitton is legendary and largely regarded as the most successful artist-meets-luxury brand collaboration ever, while for Selfridge’s in London, the collaboration represented the largest ever brand takeover, with all 24 glass windows decked out Kusama-style.
Leave a Comment