Yayoi Kusama returns with a giant sculpture and a global window takeover

Dots over the Champs-Élysées

On 6 January 2023 Louis Vuitton reveals the second collaboration in its eleven-year history with the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.^{1, 2} The reveal lands as a global brand-identity takeover rather than as a fashion launch. The Champs-Élysées flagship in Paris, a 1912 Art Déco building designed by Georges Vuitton, is covered by a giant sculpture of Kusama herself, captured in the act of painting polka dots across the building's facade.¹ The same morning, life-size animatronic Kusama figures appear in the windows of selected Louis Vuitton stores in Paris (Place Vendôme), New York (Fifth Avenue), London (New Bond Street) and Tokyo (Ginza Namiki).^{3, 4} Each robot continuously paints dots onto the inside of the glass.⁴

The collaboration is the second between the artist and the Maison, following the 2012 Infinity Dots collection commissioned by Marc Jacobs, then Creative Director.^{3, 5} The 2023 partnership is structured differently. The 2012 collection had been a product range of bags, shoes and ready-to-wear stamped with Kusama's signature dots and her Nerves and Pumpkin motifs. The 2023 partnership operates above the product range: it is a global identity takeover that uses the Maison's retail estate, advertising platforms and digital surfaces as one continuous Kusama canvas, with the product collection placed inside that canvas rather than at its centre.

The Champs-Élysées installation

The Paris reveal anchors the global rollout. The Champs-Élysées flagship is dressed with a vinyl wrap across all seven stories of the Art Déco facade and a three-dimensional Kusama sculpture is installed on the roof, reaching toward the building with an extended arm holding a paintbrush.³ The polka dots covering the building's terraces and balconies pick up Kusama's signature red-on-white pattern.⁶ The flagship sits at 101 Champs-Élysées, three blocks east of the Arc de Triomphe, and the installation is visible from the avenue's full length.^{1, 7} Pedestrian traffic on the south side of the avenue rises sharply through the first week of January according to retail-flow figures shared with the French trade press.

The Louis Vuitton headquarters at 2 rue du Pont Neuf, opposite the Maison's recently restored Samaritaine flagship, hosts a second giant Kusama sculpture in front of the building's entrance.⁶ The figure leans into the facade and applies dots from a paint can held at her side. Place Vendôme installations of the same scale follow at Harrods in London, the Selfridges Corner Shop, and Isetan Shinjuku in Tokyo through January and February 2023.

The animatronic figures

The window-animatronics are the campaign's most distinctive element. Each figure is a hyperreal silicone life-cast of Kusama, dressed in her signature red wig and red-on-white polka-dot dress, with motorised arm and head movements that allow the figure to paint dots onto the inside of the shop window in continuous loops.⁴ The robots are produced in collaboration with Kusama's studio and a Tokyo-based animatronics workshop. They run on twelve-hour daily cycles synchronised across the participating flagships and are visible to street traffic without admission to the store. Coverage in Numéro and Mixte Magazine in January 2023 reads the robots as the campaign's signature image; video clips from the Place Vendôme installation are shared widely across social platforms in the first forty-eight hours after the reveal.^{3, 4}

The campaign film and the editorial cast

The advertising-campaign component is photographed by Steven Meisel and assembles a cast of Louis Vuitton ambassadors and historical Maison-aligned models.⁸ Bella Hadid, Gisele Bündchen, Liya Kebede, Karlie Kloss, Christy Turlington, Natalia Vodianova, Devon Aoki and Malick Bodian appear across the print and film campaign.⁸ The film, shot on a set wrapped in red-and-white polka dots, treats the dots as a transformable element: across cuts the painted dots are replaced by snowflakes, by bubbles and by balls of light. The conceit reads as a tribute to Kusama's lifelong artistic preoccupation with infinity and dot-fields, which the artist first introduced in her late-1950s New York paintings and which she has continued to expand across painting, sculpture and immersive installation through to the present day.

The product collection

The product collection released alongside the takeover spans leather goods, ready-to-wear, accessories, watches and fragrance.⁵ The Monogram canvas is reissued with Kusama's painted dots overlaid on the original Georges Vuitton drawing of 1896. New silhouettes include the Speedy, Alma, Neverfull, Keepall, Pochette Métis and a series of pumpkin-shaped clutches. The collection is signed by Nicolas Ghesquière for the women's ready-to-wear pieces.³ The first drop ships to stores globally on 6 January 2023, with a second drop following on 31 March 2023.^{2, 4}

Why the second collaboration mattered

For Louis Vuitton, the 2023 Kusama partnership performs a doubled function. The first function is commercial: the partnership reactivates the Monogram canvas with the same artist who had drawn one of the brand's most commercially successful canvas treatments eleven years earlier, and uses retail and advertising surface area as the primary stage rather than the runway. The second function is positional: the collaboration places Kusama, then ninety-three years old and a sitting major-museum-retrospective subject (Hirshhorn 2017, Gropius Bau Berlin 2021, M+ Hong Kong 2022, Tate Modern 2024), at the centre of a luxury house's identity for a global cycle.¹ The brand registers the artist as a peer rather than as a guest contributor, and the editorial register installs the dot as a Louis Vuitton-aligned visual asset across the Maison's communication surfaces.

The commercial outcome confirms the strategy. LVMH's first-quarter 2023 results, released in April 2023, attribute a measurable share of the Fashion & Leather Goods division's eighteen-percent organic growth to the Kusama collaboration.⁹ The takeover ends as a continuous identity programme in the late summer of 2023; selected product pieces remain in catalogue through 2024.