Louis Vuitton's new dotty collaboration with Yayoi Kusama combines the best of both the luxury brand and the eccentric artist. Susannah Frankel looks at the history behind the collection.
Marc Jacobs first met Yayoi Kusama in Tokyo in 2006 while filming Loic Prigent's documentary, Marc Jacobs Louis Vuitton. "We talked a lot about work and the passion of making work. She was just an extremely warm and lovely woman," Jacobs has said. Any admiration was mutual, apparently: "She took great pleasure in showing off a Vuitton Speedy that she had hand-painted on this visit," said the designer.
And so began the most recent in a long line of collaborations between Louis Vuitton and art-world luminaries. The company has in the past worked with Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince and Jacobs' friend, Stephen Sprouse, some of the fruits of which have gone on to become best-sellers. Damien Hirst was responsible for a bespoke medicine chest for the brand; Grayson Perry and Tracy Emin have both curated the bookshelf at its London flagship store. Louis Vuitton's Art Talk programme, meanwhile, has seen Vanessa Beecroft, Marc Quinn, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Antony Gormley, among others, speaking to a select group of guests.
The company sponsors art shows the world over, most recently a touring retrospective of the work of Yayoi Kusama. The exhibition moved from the Pompidou Centre in Paris to Tate Modern and opens at the Whitney Museum in New York later this month.
Kusama's world, most famously, is one pre-occupied with dots: her own life is "a dot lost among millions of other dots", she once claimed. So it comes as no great surprise that silk summer dresses, swimwear, pyjamas and more have been covered with these. They will be followed at the end of August by a more extensive range of monogrammed goods which, like Murakami's rainbow-coloured designs, are destined to end up in Louis Vuitton's permanent collection.
