With Louis Vuitton, Uniqlo, Lancome and other houses, the Japanese artist turned her hypnotic visual language into wearable works.
Few artists have pushed a simple pattern as far as Yayoi Kusama did. Across paintings, pumpkins, mirrored rooms and designer pieces, the Japanese cult artist covered surfaces in seemingly endless spots, building a visual signature that eventually spilled from galleries and museums into wardrobes around the world.
Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on August 14, 2026, at 97, according to Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc., which announced her passing on August 27. Her cause of death points to multiple organ failure, although her studio said she was able to continue painting until her final days.
Her passing closes a career that spanned painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature and fashion. Decades before artist collaborations became coveted commercial capsules, Kusama was already cutting, creating and covering clothes in the same patterns that populated her paintings.
Before the brand collabs, Kusama created her own clothes
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama began making art as a child. She has spoken extensively about experiencing hallucinations involving flashes of light, fields of dots, flowers and repeating patterns—visions that would slowly feed into the obsessive repetition running through her work. After studying Nihonga, a traditional Japanese painting style, she moved to the United States in 1957 and found her footing in New York’s avant-garde art scene.
Fashion soon became another canvas for her creativity. After creating costumes for performances and happenings, Kusama established Kusama Fashion Company Ltd. in 1968. Her designs included dotted dresses, sheer pieces, strategically cut-out clothing and garments constructed for multiple people to wear at once. Her fashion business eventually earned its own “Kusama Corner” at Bloomingdale’s.
Kusama was already concocting wearable art long before major labels came knocking. Clothes gave her another place to play with pattern, provoke the public, and push her artistic ideas beyond gallery walls.
Louis Vuitton, 2012: Dots meet designer bags
Kusama’s biggest bridge between art and luxury began with Marc Jacobs, then creative director of Louis Vuitton. Jacobs visited Kusama in her Tokyo studio in 2006, beginning a creative connection that eventually produced the house’s 2012 Yayoi Kusama collaboration. Louis Vuitton credits Jacobs with initiating its relationship with the artist.
Dots dominated the drop. Kusama’s patterns appeared across ready-to-wear, handbags, shoes, accessories, jewelry and watches, placing her visual vocabulary on some of Louis Vuitton’s best-known pieces. Dedicated pop-ups pushed the partnership past the products, surrounding shoppers with Kusama’s signature spots and bringing her immersive artistic approach into retail spaces.
The collaboration put Kusama’s art directly into people’s hands—and onto their shoulders, shoes, and silhouettes.
Louis Vuitton, 2023: Bigger, bolder and dotted all over
Eleven years later, Kusama and Louis Vuitton came together again for a colossal second chapter.
Released in 2023, the collaboration reportedly covered around 450 pieces, spanning women’s and men’s ready-to-wear, bags, shoes, accessories, and fragrances. Louis Vuitton developed techniques that recreated the texture and irregularity of Kusama’s hand-painted dots across leather, while other pieces pulled from her pumpkins, Infinity Nets and the mirrored spheres associated with her 1966 installation Narcissus Garden.
The campaign became a spectacle of its own. Giant Kusama figures appeared in Louis Vuitton storefronts, including an enormous installation depicting the artist painting dots onto the Maison’s Champs-Élysées flagship in Paris. The global campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel, gathered models including Gisele Bündchen, Bella Hadid, Christy Turlington, Devon Aoki, and Anok Yai.
The partnership later became the subject of the 240-page book Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton: Creating Infinity, published by Rizzoli and packed with 300 color illustrations tracing the creative connection between Kusama and the French fashion house.
Uniqlo: Dots for the daily wardrobe
Kusama’s work also reached a broader fashion crowd through Uniqlo. In 2014, her imagery appeared across a reported collection of 10 men’s UT T-shirts, with designs drawing from her dots, nets, and artwork. Shirts carried familiar Kusama phrases and motifs including “Love Forever” and “Dots Obsession,” placing pieces of her artistic world onto an everyday wardrobe staple.
Her connection to Uniqlo stretched back further. The company’s official history of UT names Kusama among the Japanese artists and creatives who contributed artwork to its early Tokyo Now project, a collection of T-shirts originally sold exclusively in New York.
The partnership shows another side of Kusama’s fashion footprint: her work could sit on a museum wall, cover a luxury leather bag, or land on a simple graphic tee and still carry her distinctive dots.
Lancôme, 2011: Dots dress up beauty
Kusama also radiate her creativity into cosmetics. In 2011, Lancôme tapped the artist to create six limited-edition designs for its Juicy Tubes lip glosses. Her colorful patterns covered the tubes, pairing one of the beauty brand’s most recognizable products with the repetitive motifs running through her artwork.
Small enough to slip inside a purse, the collaboration showed how Kusama’s work could move seamlessly from colossal installations to compact cosmetics.
X-girl, 2017: Spots hit the streets
Streetwear got its own spin on Kusama in 2017 when the artist collaborated with Japanese labels X-girl and XLARGE.
Drawing from her Infinity Nets, polka dots, “Love Forever” message, and New York-era artwork, the capsule covered T-shirts, coach jackets, bags, and hats in Kusama-inspired graphics. The wider collaboration also included pieces produced with G-Shock and Porter, extending her dots to a watch and bags.
The streetwear setting suited an artist who had spent years taking her ideas into public spaces. Kusama’s patterns could command a gallery, cover a city storefront, or sit comfortably on a coach jacket.
Fashion was always part of Kusama’s canvas
Kusama’s fashion legacy did not begin with a designer handbag. Clothing had been part of her practice since her experimental years in New York, when she designed garments, staged performances, and used the human body as another surface for her ideas.
Over time, her red bob, bold clothes, pumpkins, and prolific polka dots formed a visual world recognized far beyond contemporary-art circles. Fashion houses simply offered fresh fabrics and formats for that world to flourish.
From a daring dress in the 1960s to a dotted Louis Vuitton Speedy decades later, Kusama kept proving that art could travel. On canvases, clothes, and communal spaces, she made infinity something people could see—and sometimes, something they could wear.
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