Buying a Kusama bag? There's a book for that!
Walk the walk and talk the talk with the Kusama x Louis Vuitton bag and our new book at Kith SoHo
Yayoi Kusama is one of the few artists to successfully transfer her work from gallery to fashion boutique. In the 1960s, she founded her own clothing line, producing avant-garde pieces such as her Silver Squid dress which had, as she explains in a 1968 press communiqué entitled Why Look Like Other People? (reproduced in our new Kusama book) “a hood covering the head, holes for the breasts and stream-like strands of material extending to the floor.”
Her more recent fashion projects have been a little less fashion forward. In 2012 at the request of Marc Jacobs, she designed a collection of accessories for the French fashion house Louis Vuitton. Though these beautiful, spotty bags were consumer friendly, Marie Laurberg, curator of Kusama’s 2015 exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, explained that Kusama refers to the Louis Vuitton accessories as an “exhibition” when talking about them. "She’s offered a platform and she puts something in it. It’s a shop window, but it’s public art."
Now those pieces of public art are available once more. Hypebae reports that Kusama’s take on the simple, iconic Speedy bag by Louis Vuitton - the red Speedy 30 - is available once again, at the Kith store in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood. What’s more, Kith are also stocking our newly updated Kusama monograph, enabling LV x Kusama bag buyers to read up on and get a real feel for, Kusama before sporting the bag in public. Get the bag and the book, and you’ll be able to tell your friends exactly how this singular artist went from the happenings of the 1960s to the hot shops of 2018.
Find out more here; and for more on Yayoi Kusama’s life, outlook and work, order a copy of our book here.