Yayoi Kusama yellow pumpkin sculpture on Naoshima, Japan

Yayoi Kusama: a life lived through art

September 2, 2026

'The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens' (2017), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Kusama has been a family favourite for years. We started them young.

“Love can save the world”...

Yayoi Kusama died last month at the age of 97, leaving behind one of the most recognisable bodies of work in modern art.

Her life was magnificent, complicated and at times very difficult. There are people far better qualified than us to tell that story, and some brilliant pieces have been written about her life and work over the past few weeks. We’ll link to a few of our favourites at the end.

What we wanted to celebrate here is the lighter side of what Kusama gave us. The colour, the optimism, the pumpkins, the flowers, the dots, and an aesthetic so completely her own that you can spot a Kusama from across a room.

Kusama has been a bit of a family favourite for years. We’ve taken the kids to see her work, we have her books around the house and they regularly get them out to copy the patterns, cutting up bits of coloured card and making their own versions. We then find tiny paper dots around the house for days afterwards. They don’t need to know the art history behind any of it. They just know they love it.

There’s something quite lovely about that. Kusama’s work can be found in some of the world’s biggest museums and sells for millions, but a five-year-old can look at one of her pumpkins and be moved enough to want to have a go themselves.

The dots, pumpkins and flowers that became so recognisable came from a much more complicated place. Kusama spoke openly throughout her life about her mental health and the hallucinations she experienced from childhood, and about using art as a way of dealing with them. We’ll leave the fuller story to the writers and institutions linked below, but it makes the joy and generosity in so much of her work feel all the more remarkable.

Kusama was still painting in the final days of her life. Following her death, the Yayoi Kusama Museum and Foundation spoke about her lifelong belief that “love can save the world”.

Kusama meets Louis Vuitton

Fashion wasn’t a late addition to Kusama’s career. She had experimented with clothing as part of her work as far back as the 1960s and even established her own fashion company.

Her relationship with Louis Vuitton began in 2006 when Marc Jacobs, then the house’s creative director, visited her studio in Tokyo. Jacobs had already brought artists including Stephen Sprouse and Takashi Murakami into Louis Vuitton and was fascinated by Kusama and the repetition that ran through her work.

Louis Vuitton went on to support Kusama’s major Tate Modern retrospective in 2012, followed by their first collection together later that year. Her dots appeared across bags, dresses, shoes, jewellery, shop windows and silk scarves.

Marc Jacobs said at the time that part of the idea was to introduce Kusama to people who might never visit a museum. More than a decade later, it is hard to argue that it didn’t work.

The collaboration put Kusama’s work in front of an enormous new audience. It also made complete sense for an artist who had never been particularly interested in keeping her work neatly contained on a canvas. Her dots had already covered rooms, furniture, trees, bodies and entire installations. A Louis Vuitton bag or a square of silk was simply another place for them to go.

Living with Kusama

There are plenty of ways to experience Kusama. You can queue for an Infinity Mirror Room, visit one of her giant pumpkins, buy one of her books, or, if your budget stretches considerably further than ours, start looking at original paintings and sculptures.

For us, the textiles sit in a particularly interesting place. Some were made with Louis Vuitton, others were produced alongside exhibitions and art projects, but they all take something recognisably Kusama and put it onto an object that can actually be lived with.

Kusama spent most of her 97 years making art and continued almost until the very end. The fact that our kids are currently sitting at the kitchen table copying the same dots she first started drawing as a child feels like a small but rather nice example of how that work carries on.

Yayoi Kusama at Framed Silk Scarves

We currently have five Kusama pieces in the collection, ranging from her Louis Vuitton collaborations to textiles created around her wider art practice.

Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Dots Pumpkin, Yellow & Black

Perhaps the most instantly recognisable Kusama of the collection. Created for her second collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2023, it brings together the yellow pumpkin and black dots that have become synonymous with her work.

Kusama had been drawing pumpkins since childhood, long before they became monumental sculptures and one of the defining images of her career. Here, that same motif fills a 90cm Louis Vuitton silk carré.

Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Dots Pumpkin, Red & Black

The companion piece takes the same 2023 collaboration in a completely different direction, with the pumpkin surrounded by a graphic field of red, black and white.

It’s a good example of just how naturally Kusama’s work translated to fashion. Even without seeing her name, there isn’t much doubt whose world you’re looking at.

Tsumari in Bloom, 2018

One of our favourite pieces in the collection, and a nice example of Kusama beyond Louis Vuitton.

Created for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, the 104cm textile depicts Kusama’s Tsumari in Bloom sculpture, with brightly coloured flowers and dots spreading across the entire composition.

There’s something we particularly like about the journey of this one. A sculpture became an image on cloth and, framed at its full size, the textile becomes something to put on the wall again.

The Joy I Feel

A smaller 30cm cotton piece and a very different side of Kusama. Instead of the familiar pumpkins, the composition is packed with faces and organic forms in bright orange and blue.

It’s a lovely reminder that there is much more to Kusama’s visual world than the dots and pumpkins that made her famous.

LAMMFROMM Tokyo, Black & White

Another less familiar Kusama, this time completely stripped of the bright colour normally associated with her work.

Created for LAMMFROMM Tokyo, the 53cm cotton textile is filled with eyes, faces, dots and hand-drawn forms. Framed, it feels almost like a page of Kusama drawings blown up and put on the wall.

Explore the full Yayoi Kusama collection →