Illegal orgies, an ill-fated clothing line, and Louis Vuitton handbags: we trace the Japanese artist’s influence on the industry
Yayoi Kusama is 92 years old and wants to self-obliterate. Be it through endless spirals of her trademark polka dots, the kaleidoscopic expanses of her infinity rooms, or the globular sculptures created to swallow entire spaces, it has been Kusama’s lifelong goal to negate herself into the environment and in doing so, reach total and utter oblivion.
For over 50 years, the dotted tentacles of Kusama’s work have punched holes in culture, imbuing the Japanese artist with a transcending celebrity which, in recent times, has translated to serious social cachet. In 2017, a gallery in LA had to impose a 30 second selfie rule to allow for the steady flow of guests who had queued (for hours) to see Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors. And in a Washington gallery earlier that same year, a visitor tripped, fell into, and smashed a Kusama pumpkin while attempting a poorly-staged photo in the artist’s resplendent roomscape.
There was a time, though, when things weren’t quite so Instagram-friendly. In the 60s, Kusama was at the helm of an emerging vanguard in New York, where she was best known for throwing wild orgies, illegal gay marriages, and impromptu displays of naked performance art. These “happenings” would see Kusama pursued by the FBI, trialled, and even imprisoned.
Yet throughout all of her forays into counter-culture, fashion has been a rarely-acknowledged red thread. Until Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, her clothing enterprise, Kusama Fashions Ltd, produced garments unrestrained by traditional approaches to design. Her shows frequently descended into sex-fests and, despite leitmotifs of protest and nudity, her collections were stocked in hundreds of commercial boutiques across the US.
From Martin Margiela to Rei Kawakubo, Kusama’s outré pieces predate some of the fashion industry’s best-known innovators, “my costumes invariably suggest the path of the new generation” she once told The Guardian and this goes way beyond the humble polka dot. Below, we hone in on Yayoi Kusama’s relationship with clothing and the rarely explored legacy she has left on the runways of today.
KUSAMA’S PERSONAL STYLE
The curation of a particular self-image is both an extension of Kusama’s art and a medium of publicity. In the early 60s, despite dressing in a consistently modern style back home in Japan, Kusama would often appear at gallery openings and public events dressed in sumptuous kimonos. Amid the post-war art scene, which was revelling in national pride, the kimono became a tool of self-display and performance. See Walking Piece, which saw the artist wandering dejectedly through Manhattan wearing a blossoming pink kimono and ornate parasol, satirising the westernised image of a geisha which had been popularised by war films of the time (like Sayonara or The Barbarian and the Geisha).
It was one of the harsh realities of a Western art market that taught her to play with her “exotic” appearance in order to find success but it also taught her a valuable lesson in self-style and promotion. As she started to experiment in spatial installations, her clothing – which always blends into the work she is exhibiting – became another device to obliterate space and the perceptual field. In much the same way as Warhol (who Kusama claims copied her ideas) iconised himself in a silver wig, striped t-shirt, and leather jacket, Kusama is now rarely seen without a bright red wig and a dotted dress – the culmination of a longtime exercise in self-branding.
KUSAMA FASHION COMPANY LTD
In 1968, having long designed costumes as part of her extravaganzas and happenings, Yayoi Kusama established the Kusama Fashion Company Ltd. She already had a legion of imitators, so it made sense. In an interview last year, Kusama told the story of how she tracked down and joined forces with the president of a company who had been emulating her designs. “The mass media reported us big time… Buyers from big department stores came and selected 100 of this, 200 of that,” she explained. Soon, Kusama was sold in 400 stores and boutiques across the US. Bloomingdales even set up a “Kusama Corner” and in April 1969, she set up a short-lived boutique on the corner of Sixth Avenue.
The brand was known for its daring pieces, which riffed on Kusama’s obsession with orgies and nudity. There was the “Squid Dress”, which came hooded with breast cut-outs and revealing flaps (v reminiscent of this Rick Owens show), the “Homo Dress”, which featured a hole placed strategically in the rear, and a whole host of evening gowns with convenient peep-holes. Admittedly, however, she revealed “the radical vanguard items that I poured my energy into sold little in the end”.
In her autobiography, Infinity Net, Katsuma writes “clothes should bring people together, not separate them”. So, she started the Nude Fashion Company, an offshoot of Kusama Fashions to bring “fresh ideas for enjoying sex into the mainstream” like the “Couples Dress”, a sleeping-bag-like piece, or the “Party Dress”, which could accommodate up to 25 people. “I used these fashions in various kinds of events,” she says – with all of them decorated, unsurprisingly, with polka dots.
ACCUMULATION SERIES AND REI KAWAKUBO
For her “Homosexual Wedding” spectacle in 1968, which claimed to be the “first homosexual wedding ever to be performed” in the accompanying press release, Kusama wore a bright pink “Phallic Dress”. Covered in stuffed tendrils, it could easily have been part of the artist’s Accumulation Series, which features canvases and objects protruding with repeating appendages.
While it’s perhaps some of Kusama’s most overlooked work commercially, it’s an undeniable precursor to some of Rei Kawakubo’s defining moments at Comme des Garçons. Be it through convoluted padded tubing, amoebic sprouts of fabric, or obsessively placed protrusions, Kawakubo and Kusama have never accepted conventional limits of sculpture and silhouette. Whorls of swollen fabric redraw the contours of an object, creating new, unsettling forms suggestive of disease and deformity. Kawakubo has expressed this as the “fear of going beyond common sense” but is this not exactly what Kusama aims for?
This isn’t mere speculation: Kawakubo has made her admiration for Kusama pretty clear, with the two hosting a joint, LED-dotted exhibition called Room to Grow in 2009 (and that’s before you’ve considered this red wig, polka dot look from Comme Des Garçon’s AW12 collection). Today, echoes of the accumulation series are turning up via Kawakubo everywhere from Noir Kei Ninomiya and Iris Van Herpen’s runways, to the collections of rising designer Chet Lo.
FOOD OBSESSION AND MARGIELA
“As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see,” Yayoi Kusama once said. In her Food Obsession sculptures, this terror came from thinking about the vast quantities of food a person consumes in a lifetime. “The thought of continually eating something like macaroni, spat out by machinery, fills me with fear and revulsion, so I make macaroni sculptures. I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this obliteration,” she says in her autobiography.
Shirts, dresses, bags, and shoes came festooned in dried pasta. Whole items were then dipped in gold and silver paints or sprayed with chrome, as if they had been spewed up in one big mess. We’ve seen this more recently, too, in the crusty, silver coated work of Margiela. For both designers, the application of paint unifies their clothing as experiments in soft-sculpture. But there’s an element of revile there, too. Between dried globs of paint and fabric stiffened in motion, fashion is presented as an uncanny artefact as opposed to something livable or human. Elsewhere, the brand also paid homage to Kusama’s meticulously clustered affixions, as in John Galliano’s debut outing when he showed lacquered shells stuck bulging from the front of a coat.
LOUIS VUITTON AND OTHER COLLABORATIONS
It may seem at odds for an artist so deeply rooted in anti-establishment rhetoric to join forces with some of the biggest consumer brands on the planet. But for Kusama, who wholeheartedly enjoys her fame, this is another method of self-obliteration. Just like her interminable polka dots, she, too, could be everywhere.
In 2012, Kusama and Marc Jacobs presented Louis Vuitton’s biggest collaboration to date. Coinciding with Kusama’s major retrospective at the Whitney (which Vuitton sponsored), Jacobs and Kasuma brought forth a women’s collection, spanning jewellery, bags, pyjamas, and outerwear, covered in Kasuma’s clinically dotted spirals. The range was stocked in Vuitton’s international stores, as well as a series of special pop-ups. And that same season, Kasuma’s dots turned up in the collections of David Koma, Diane Von Fustenburg, and Stella McCartney. While it would be outrageous to assume every polka dot had Kasuma’s influence, it would be remiss not to mention Charles Jeffrey, whose freehand bacteria-like sketches and prints are very reminiscent of Kasuma’s unconscious, googly-eyed paintings.
Alongside Vuitton, Kasuma has collabed with Lancome, Veuve Clicquot, Japanese mobile phone providers, and Kim Gordon’s streetwear brand X-girl, to name but a few. In doing so, the artist has created an intricate network of intermediaries who send out polka dotted objects throughout the world in her quest for total domination, consumption, and eventual obliteration.