Louis Vuitton's Yayoi Kusama Collection Is Back for the First Time in a Decade

Everything Yayoi Kusama does is infinite.

In 2006, the then-creative director of Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, met Kusama at her studio in Tokyo. The Japanese artist handed the designer a Vuitton Ellipse bag, hand-painted with her signature dots. Six years later, Jacobs would send similar bags down the runway, launching one of the brand’s most popular artist collaborations to date.

Kusama’s art—which typically features dots and mirrors—is inspired by repetition, eternity, and the illusion of a never-ending space. Her Vuitton collaboration is just as circular: Over a decade after its debut, it’s back.

Today, Louis Vuitton launched the first part of its second collaboration with the artist. There are still dots (appearing on bags as hyper-realistic wet paint dabs, inspired by a Louis Vuitton trunk hand-painted by Kusama in 2012), as well as metallic studs meant to mimic the metallic orbs of Kusama’s Narcissus Garden and the famous Infinity Rooms you’ve seen on your Instagram feed. The collection, which features over 450 pieces, isn’t just bags. There’s also dotted jeans, spotted Archlight sneakers, and metallized leather jackets—plus menswear, fragrances, and eyewear. The second drop will focus more on Kusama’s pumpkin motif and become available in March.

Kusama has remarked that the original Vuitton collection was designed to embody the concept of “Love Forever.” In response, Marc Jacobs noted, “Love is a beautiful idea. The dots represent something that has no points, no hard edges and is infinite. And what could be nicer than infinite love?” The collection was indeed released to much love from fans, and it remains loved on resale sites.

So far, Nicolas Ghesquière’s take is equally well-liked—literally. Campaign images featuring Gisele Bündchen, Anok Yai, and Fei Fei Sun garnered over 1 million likes on the fashion house’s instagram last month, which is nearly forty times more the average engagement per post.

Then again, this is also the first time a Louis Vuitton Yayoi Kusama collection has debuted on Instagram. Back in 2012, Louis Vuitton didn’t even have an account. Still, the original Yayoi Kusama collection was Instagramable before anyone knew what that meant.

The collection and the pop-up spaces selling it—like the one in New York’s Meatpacking district, with the entire store covered in floor-to-ceiling infinity dots and lined with extra-large metallic orbs—are clearly built for the social media era. Whether the response will be the same as it was ten years ago has yet to be determined, but with a new generation increasingly obsessed with archival fashion and collections of the past, the stage is set for success and plenty of TikToks.

Currently on the social media platform, Louis Vuitton’s 2002 Murakami collection, emblematic of peak Y2K fashion, has Gen Z’s attention. Kusama’s dots, though, represent an entirely different style era defined by bow headbands and the kind of outfits Zoey Deschanel would wear in 500 Days of Summer—not necessarily the ones you’d see Paris Hilton wearing out to a club in 2004. But maybe 2023 will finally be the year whimsical 2010s fashion really does make a comeback. Fashion is as cyclical as Kusama’s dots, after all.

You can shop the first drop of the new Louis Vuitton Yayoi Kusama collection here.

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