Paris Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027: Anrealage Moves Beyond Skin Deep

The digital glow of the finale at the Anrealage show in Paris, inspired by the firebird that designer Kunihiko Morinaga made a theme of his new conceptual work. Cover picture of McQueen by Sean McGirr SS27. 

There are fashion shows that present clothes then there are those that make you question what a garment can actually be. At Anrealage, Kunihiko Morinaga has spent years exploring the pioneering boundaries of fashion, and for Spring/Summer 2027 he pushed that experimentation even further. At the Maison de la Radio, his 25th Paris presentation became an encounter between mythology, advanced technology and the changing surface of the body. Story by Franco Di Chiera and Steven Choo

The eye-popping colours

and changing patterns of

the Anrealage collection.

FOR his new collection called Skin, launched during Paris Fashion Week, Japanese designer Kunihiko Morinaga imagined his latest designs not as static forms but as transformative objects. A design could change its surface, alter its colour, acquire another identity and begin again. His inspiration moved between the biological world and the digital one, from the skins of living creatures to the interchangeable skins of videogame avatars.

“Living things shed their skin, again and again,” the designer says. “They slip out of the old skin and live on in the new.”

From this idea, Morinaga built a collection caught between organism and machine. Second-skin bodysuits carried patterns of scales, pixels, robots and fantastical creatures. Ultrasuede was cut into individual scales, while Japanese washi, reflective sequins and digitally printed textiles collided across the silhouettes. 

Familiar garments became optical illusions: denim, tailoring and videogame costumes appeared not as conventional clothes, but as images constructed across another surface. Three-dimensional scales changed their appearance according to the angle of light and the movement of the wearer. What looked like a particular colour from one side could become another from the next. The effect was subtle, but uncanny as though the clothes had developed their own visual metabolism.

The transformation reached its extraordinary climax with armour-like cocktail and evening dresses covered in thousands of individually controlled 'e-ink' electronic-paper scales. Unlike an LED display, the garments did not project light onto the body. The electronic paper itself changed colour, allowing vivid patterns to appear, dissolve into ash grey and reform in entirely new configurations.

As the three-dimensional scales changed their appearance, the effect was uncanny as though the clothes had developed their own visual metabolism

Scales along the design's surface

altered with light and movement. 

Beneath the surfaces, an intricate network of wires connected the individual scales, while AI was used to map the circuitry. The result was extraordinary: colour seemed to travel across the dresses like pigment moving through living skin, suggesting that the garments were not displaying an image so much as becoming one.

Morinaga found his central symbol in the firebird, inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix: “It burns out in the flames, and its life comes to an end. And yet, from the ashes, it rises again, and again.” 

As Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 The Firebird filled the Maison de la Radio with a live performance, the clothes entered their own cycle of death and rebirth. Colour disappeared. Then it returned. The garments seemed to burn without flame and regenerate without leaving the body.

Even the collection’s number carried meaning. “At Anrealage, A and Z overlap, and 25 makes one cycle,” Morinaga explains. His anniversary collection consequently became a meditation on endings that contain their own beginnings.

And then came the final apparition: a body clothed in digital light, glowing like the firebird that had inspired the collection (see main image). This last look returned to the LED technology of the previous season, creating a very different kind of transformation, one in which the body itself appeared to become a moving image.

It was a glimpse beyond the human, suggesting a future in which clothing might exist for forms of life capable of outlasting us. For Morinaga, this is where the idea of skin reaches its furthest point. “Perhaps those clothes will be called a third skin,” he says. At the Maison de la Radio, the designer made that idea visible: fashion transforming, rising from the ashes and becoming something new

After 25 presentations in Paris, this collection was not a look back. It was about what happens after an ending when the old surface has disappeared and there is nothing left but the possibility of beginning again.

See more highlights from the Anrealage Spring/Summer 2027 Collection below

A Brief History of Denim and Why the ‘Perfect Pair’ of Jeans Remains Elusive

Slim, straight-leg and skinny jeans have made a return, this time with higher waists and softer denim. Pictured above is Bella Hadid in am indigo Topshop 'Orson' pair. 

By Rose Marroncelli

Denim is present in practically every country in the world and is widely adopted as one of the most common forms of everyday attire. Its appeal spans generations and social groups: jeans are worn worldwide by those who follow fashion and those who do not, by people seeking to stand out and by those who prefer to blend in. However, many of us have never found the perfect pair.

Although denim has been produced since the 16th century, its association with American culture and durable workwear emerged during the Californian gold rush of the 1850s. It was during this time that Levi’s – now arguably the most recognisable denim brand – was established.

Levi Strauss, an immigrant entrepreneur who arrived in California from Bavaria in the 1850s, opened a dry goods business catering to miners. One of his customers, the tailor Jacob Davis, developed the innovative use of metal rivets to reinforce stress points in work trousers, making them more durable. Strauss and Davis jointly patented this technique, and the Levi’s brand was born.

Blue jeans were originally a seen as symbol of labourers (like the miners) and they also gained a strong association with cowboys. In the decades that followed, denim jeans evolved from practical workwear into one of the most iconic and enduring symbols of global fashion and culture. Film stars such as Marlon Brando and James Dean popularised the jeans and t-shirt look to a young generation in the 1950s. These films personified motorcycle-loving nonconformists, and 1950s Hollywood embraced denim as the garment of rebellion.

Today, the cultural significance of denim jeans has moved beyond early associations with workwear, the cowboy and the teenage rebel, to become a staple worn by people of all ages and backgrounds.

Finding the perfect pair

Denim jeans are often seen as a problematic fashion product in terms of sustainability, because their production leaves a considerable environmental footprint.

Cheap prices on the high street can encourage consumers to treat denim products as short-term items, reducing their lifespan. Cotton, which is commonly the main fabric for denim, is incredibly water intensive; the production of one pair of jeans uses approximately 7,500 litres of water.

Different components involved in the making of a single pair of jeans, such as denim, thread, cotton and buttons, can originate from different countries all over the world. This raises questions regarding the environmental costs involved in the production process. Further issues include that jeans are often not made from single fibre materials and therefore cannot be recycled.

Denim is a popular fabric around the world. Andrii Nekrasov

Adding to sustainability concerns, at the consumer level, the perfect pair of jeans remains an elusive concept. But in a recently published book chapter, I explain that the perfect pair of jeans is elusive for a reason. Jeans have to be correct for the individual wearer in terms of comfort, social and personal identity, and also the complexity of fit.

Previous reports have focused on women’s struggle to find jeans that fit and are flattering. The inability to find the perfect pair of jeans may encourage overconsumption, due to repeated purchasing based on poor fit.

My research shows that this is an issue which applies to all genders. The men I spoke to noted how they resented paying a higher price for brands like Levi’s, so spent less by purchasing cheap, high street alternatives. This attitude can lead to overconsumption, as low price points achieved through low-quality production often compromise product longevity.

This demonstrates the perpetuating cycle of fast fashion, driven by cheap, low-quality production, and contradicts the original purpose of jeans of being highly durable and having longevity. The combination of highly environmentally damaging production processes with overconsumption results in even greater environmental harm.

Retailers can make efforts to reduce the trend of overconsumption with better fitting garments. However, fit is a complex issue for retailers as well as consumers. For the retailer, producing jeans in a wide range of sizes and styles is often not cost effective, and complex sizing systems can also confuse the consumer.

Technology could provide future solutions to improving the accuracy of fit. Personalised virtual fitting, made possible through improvements in 3D human shape recognition, could ensure improved fit for the consumer. This would benefit online shoppers, although the technology does remain in its infancy, and is yet to be adopted by major online fashion retailers. Virtual fitting rooms also cannot replicate the feeling of denim next to the skin, so although the fit may be perfect, comfort could be compromised.

Ultimately, the enduring challenge of finding the “perfect pair” of jeans highlights not only the garment’s cultural significance but also the opportunity for the fashion industry – and consumers – to move toward more sustainable, better-fitting and more thoughtfully designed denim for the future.

Rose Marroncelli, Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University

The Margaret Preston Retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria is a Revelation

Self-portrait of Margaret Preston from 1930. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. © Margaret Preston/Licensed by Copyright Agency Australia. Image © Art Gallery of New South Wales. Cover picture of the 'Pottery of Gladys Reynell S.A ' painted by the artist in 1922. 

By Sasha Grishin

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Margaret Preston is a breathtaking exhibition. It is Preston as we have never seen her before, and challenges many earlier preconceptions.We see her work in the context of her students/lovers, Bessie Gibson and Gladys Reynell, and her obsession with First Nations art – her adaptations, her collections, and, now, commentaries on her adaptations by Trevor Nickolls and Gordon Bennett, among others.

A much more complex and nuanced image of Preston emerges than in previous exhibitions.

The show is a mixture of a chronological survey with her early still life paintings from the opening decade of the 20th century, then her decorative flower pieces moving to the magnificence of her hand-coloured woodcuts.

There is a desire to bring her art to life: we see her iconic Wheelflower print of 1929, next to the actual woodblock from which it was printed. Her First Nations pieces are shown together with their actual sources of inspiration.

The exhibition is full of these little detective pieces that save the exhibition from being just another Margaret Preston show to make it into the Margaret Preston show for our generation.

The vivid 'Coastal Gums' 

by Matgaret Preston, 1929. 

Private Collection

© Margaret Preston

Licensed by Copyright 

Agency, Australia

A spectacular makeover

Born Margaret Rose McPherson in Adelaide in 1875, she initially trained in Sydney, then at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. She spent many years travelling in Europe, mainly in Germany, France and England.

She first travelled with Betty Davidson and then Gladys Reynell, with both of whom, the NGV catalogue asserts, she had a romantic bond.

She exhibited to limited acclaim, first under the name of Rose McPherson and by 1912 as Margaret McPherson.

Her personal and artistic makeover was as spectacular as it was sudden.

On the last day of 1919, the 44-year-old McPherson falsified her age by eight years and married Lieutenant William George Preston, subsequently a successful businessman. This made her, at least on the marriage certificate, a socially respectable two years younger than her husband, rather than the embarrassing six years older.

She changed her exhibiting name to Margaret Preston and, armed with her husband’s wealth, launched her new career with a massive publicity blitz that was to last until her death in 1963.

Following her marriage, she settled with her husband in the bayside Sydney suburb of Mosman and moved rapidly up the social ladder to become a friend of the publisher Sydney Ure Smith.

Preston was the most articulate and outspoken female artist of her generation, writing frequent articles and giving lectures and interviews.

While always a committed traveller, after her marriage Preston embarked on numerous journeys throughout Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.

At the height of the Depression, the Prestons moved from Mosman to a 14-acre block in rural Berowra, before returning to the Mosman neighbourhood in 1939, where they remained until her death.

Thea Proctor's Tea Party, 1924 by Margaret

Preston. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

Purchased in 1942.© Margaret Preston 

A revelation

For me, a revelation of this exhibition is her late stencil pieces, including Christ turning the water into wine (1951) and White gum (1953) where Preston in her mature years is grappling with a host of conceptual problems and exhibits a brilliant technical inventiveness.

While many of the pieces have been seen before, here they gain a new poignancy through their new context.

With over 200 works on display, there is enough to present a comprehensive overview to gain a good understanding of her work and her contribution to Australian art and not an overkill requiring a packed lunch for viewing every print she ever made.

On ‘primative’ art

Although a strong advocate for First Nations art, I feel that Preston’s attitude still sat within the framework of cultural imperialism.

That is, it came from one who had not the slightest doubt in the superiority of her own culture that could absorb “primitive” elements from Indigenous cultures.

She illustrated how a sacred Kimberley dancing board could give you a suggestion for a curtain. In 1924 she boasted,

I have barely altered the design […] The Australian aboriginal has followed the usual abstract designs that are characteristic of the savage […] I have suggested a cushion cover that could be adapted from the design.

Aboriginal Still Life 1940, by Margaret Preston.

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Gift of the

Godfrey Rivers Trust through Miss Daphne 

Mayo, 1940. © Margaret Preston

In 1925 Preston wrote,

In wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own, I have gone to the art of a people who have never seen or known anything different from themselves, and were accustomed to always use the same symbols to express themselves.

[…]

It is on the primitive natural forms that we must depend. In returning to primitive art it should be remembered that it is to be used as a starting point only for a renewal of growth, and a gradual selection must take place to arrive at the culmination.

Over the decades, Preston’s attitude to First Nations art matured as she travelled thousands of kilometres to view rock art and art in various communities. But the art remained a quarry from which a “civilized” artist could plunder elements from which to create an “authentic” Australian national art.

Preston’s ideas on a national art were naïve, but, as shown by this exhibition, she did create a powerful and memorable oeuvre.

Margaret Preston is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia until January 31 2027.

Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

The Extraordinary Evolution of Reading Fiction, from Moral Vice to Modern Medicine for the Mind, How Attitudes have Changed over Three Centuries

A recent university study found that reading fiction promotes positive emotions, connections with others and personal growth. Painting (above): "The Reader" (La Liseuse) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, c. 1770, National Museum of Art, Washington D.C., United States. Cover picture of Stephane Rolland Haute Couture AW26 by Andrea Heinsohn for DAM.

By Cleo O'Callaghan Yeoman

Ask someone today why they enjoy reading novels and they will likely say it allows them to escape real life and immerse themselves in a different world. This escapism is seen as positive, but for centuries novel reading was thought to corrupt readers for precisely these reasons.

This year is the UK’s National Year of Reading – a government-led campaign “to help more people (re)discover the joy of reading and make it part of their everyday lives”.

The campaign seeks to reverse declining levels of reading for pleasure, explored in two reports: Children and Young People’s Reading in 2025 and The State of the Nation’s Adult Reading 2024. It does not promote novels exclusively, but they are inevitably a popular choice for many readers.

Beginning from the premise that reading “expands worlds, sharpens minds and fuels creativity”, the campaign echoes ongoing research into the relationship between novel reading and personal wellbeing. For example, a 2023 study carried out at the University of Edinburgh recently showed that reading fiction promotes positive emotions, connection with others and personal growth.

Science writer Rita Matter giving her TEDx talk, Why Reading Matters.

At a time when we are being encouraged to read more, it is striking to consider how attitudes towards novel reading have evolved since the genre began to develop during the 18th century. In Britain, early examples were written by Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. But the novel ultimately emerged from an earlier European tradition and was heavily influenced by nonfictional forms, including letters and histories.

Novel reading as guilty pleasure

'The Readers" by French artist

Jacques-Emile Blanche, c.1890. 

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the novel was generally considered low-brow literature, often being described by critics (in some cases seriously and in others more jokingly) as a kind of poison, waste or disease.

Around the turn of the 19th century, the novel’s reputation reached an all-time low. One reason for this was that more novels were being written in Britain than ever before. This was the Romantic period – best remembered today for giving us the novels of Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Mary Shelley, who gave the world Frankenstein.

But it was also a period in which a whole raft of other novels by now-forgotten authors were produced en-masse. Austen alludes to this in Northanger Abbey (1817) when, making fun of the idea that all novels are bad, she refers to “the trash with which the press now groans”.

The number of people reading novels also increased dramatically during these years, meaning that the dangers posed by novels seemed even more threatening. Novel reading was thus a kind of guilty pleasure – people knew that it was disapproved of, but still they indulged – much like fast food or trash TV today.

In the introduction to her 50-volume book The British Novelists in 1810 – one of the earliest attempts to canonise the novel – the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld recognises this tension:

A collection of novels has a better chance of giving pleasure than of commanding respect […] but their leaves are seldom found unopened, and they occupy the parlour and the dressing-room while productions of higher name are often found gathering dust upon the shelf.

But why was novel reading considered so disreputable?

Evolving attitudes

Young Girl Reading (Jeane fille lisant)

by Mary Cassatt, c.1894. 

As Barbauld suggests, novel reading was deemed frivolous and not nearly as valuable a use of time as reading, say, a work of history or moral philosophy, which offered new knowledge and ways of understanding the world.

There was also a concern that novel readers would become so immersed in fiction that they would either no longer be able to distinguish it from real life or neglect their daily duties. In Marriage (1818), a novel by Austen’s Scottish contemporary Susan Ferrier, the heavily satirised housewife Mrs Gaffaw “reads novels” and is therefore “above managing her house”.

Within Romantic-period novels, including those by Austen and Ferrier, numerous examples can be found of readers who become overly absorbed in fiction. The consequences of this are invariably bad – often including sexual misconduct and moral decay – thereby providing warnings to other readers.

Today, a different view is taken. As one young reader cited in a recent article on the wellbeing benefits of reading fiction put it, novels provide an opportunity to “calm down and just get away from the world”. Getting lost in a novel is a good thing – one that allows time for quiet and reflection.

The same message underpins our summer reading lists, such as the one in Condé Nast Traveller magazine, in which the mark of “a great holiday read is its ability to transport and immerse you into a completely different world”.

In this sense, we have come full circle. The escapism that made novel reading so dangerous 200 years ago is now craved by 21st-century readers and hailed as a means of necessary self-regulation. Regardless of personal reading preferences, it is clear that debates on the value of fiction, and how we engage with what we read, remain central to popular culture.

Cleo O'Callaghan Yeoman, Research Associate in Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

They are Content Creators with Thousands of Adoring Fans - So Why do they Feel so Terrible?

The pursuit of fame for fame’s sake has become almost banal in the attention economy and the strange oppressiveness of collective adulation is becoming far more ubiquitous and insidious.

By Julianna Pillemer

If given the chance to gain thousands of admirers for your work, would you take it? The artists who my colleagues and I interviewed as part of our research on content creators did – and many went on to question whether it was worth it.

Mark, an illustrator with millions of followers, revealed a deep sense of dread about what was once his dream: to make a living creating art and sharing it online. (We used pseudonyms to protect the privacy of the people we interviewed.)

“The thing that I got right, that I loved for the longest time and now has almost become the bane of my existence, is creating relatable comics,” he told us. “Now, I’m stuck … I would rather die than make relatable comics, but I’ve built an empire of relatable comics. So what the (heck) am I supposed to do with my life?”

Ironically, the very thing that Mark felt he needed to fulfill his dream – a large, admiring audience for his illustrations – began to feel like a prison. No longer a distant or abstract entity, he now felt inextricably linked to his followers and their reactions to his work.

As an organizational psychologist, I’m convinced that Mark’s existential angst is not unique, nor is it relegated to content creators. Rather, it has profound implications for anyone who cares about the future of work.

Although the strange oppressiveness of collective adulation isn’t new, it is becoming far more ubiquitous – and insidious – in the attention economy.

A ‘chamber of despair’

The pursuit of fame for fame’s sake has become an almost banal pursuit in the attention economy. Content creation is, according to some estimates, a US$300 billion industry. Goldman Sachs projects it to grow to half a trillion dollars within the next few years.

Becoming a content creator has officially elbowed out old standbys like doctor and astronaut as the job that Gen Z and Gen Alpha most aspire to have. Countless online courses now promise to teach the ropes of content creation, while Arizona State University will be offering a new content creation major.

And yet, the realization of this goal often comes with unanticipated psychological costs.

The 54 creators we interviewed as part of our multiyear research project – visual artists and musicians with massive online followings – repeatedly described the unrelenting sense they had of being oppressed or restricted by their audiences, using phrases that involved contorting themselves into two-dimensional versions of themselves.

One artist bemoaned that she had to “flatten and suppress her real self” to engage her audience. An illustrator revealed that she had felt like a “crumpled-up ball of paper” for years. An otherwise chipper cartoonist likened her audience to a “chamber of despair” that nobody else understands.

Over time, we came to think of this condition as “audience entanglement.” It’s a state in which creators become so psychologically intertwined with their followers that the audience begins shaping not just what they make – a phenomenon that has been referred to as “audience capture” – but also the meaning they derive from their work and how they understand themselves.

Audience entanglement plagued creators from all walks of life, regardless of age, gender or nationality. It struck musicians and illustrators, YouTubers and Instagrammers, self-proclaimed anxious wrecks and the freest of spirits. No single personality type or demographic was immune to the experience of a deep enmeshment with one’s audience, and to its profound consequences for their creativity and well-being.

Suffocated by a pressure to perform

Becoming entangled with one’s audience meant that followers’ reactions – whether positive or negative – often started to feel like a burden.

Creators described feeling hypersensitive to how their posts performed, and spending more and more time each day monitoring them.

Then there were the comments. As Selena, an illustrator, put it, a single mean message “would ruin” their week. While they recognized that they needed an audience to do the work they loved, managing it began to feel like a job in and of itself – and not one they signed up for.

At their lowest points, the creators we spoke to were not disrupted merely by the errant hostile comment. They described being unable to take in even the most effusive messages from their audience – the types of affirmations that had initially pushed them to begin creating in the first place.

An adoring audience can be both a reward and a burden. Golden Sikorka/iStock via Getty Images

One wildly successful creator, Maya, recalled receiving direct messages from fans that her art was the only thing getting them through death, divorce and other catastrophic life events. Maya experienced this profoundly positive feedback as being harder to handle than critique:

“I didn’t know how to really hold people’s pain in a meaningful way, and I was also getting really deep criticism – and, in a way, I could almost deal with that better than praise. It’s just a lot for a person to take on.”

As a result, many creators began to view this creative path they had once wanted more than anything as totally unsustainable. There was a tragic irony to this pain. The very thing that made their creative work possible – a large, mostly admiring audience – was also its biggest threat. The audience that allowed them to monetize their creations in the first place had now led to creative paralysis.

Healthy boundaries, intentional engagement

Not everyone we spoke to remained forever imprisoned by their so-called fans. For some, the intense enmeshment they experienced eventually morphed into something healthier.

The creators who shifted toward this dynamic did not stop caring about their audiences. Instead, they learned to develop clear boundaries around audience interactions and clarity on who they wanted to be online – what we called “entanglement management strategies.” By limiting time and energy engaging with the platform, they were able to escape the prison of their fans and once again find meaning and a sense of authenticity online.

As Charlie, an illustrator, explained:

“There is something about hitting this true internal place where, it’s kind of a mystical thing, but some balance between being yourself internally and being yourself externally. There’s some sweet spot there where you know what your audience is and what they expect, and you know where you as a person or creative person overlaps.”

Having spent the better part of two decades researching the psychology of work, I believe that audience entanglement doesn’t just happen to full-time influencers.

The ability to cultivate and manage an online audience has become an essential skill in more traditional professions, like journalism, politics and higher education, with large followings sometimes becoming a prerequisite for, versus a consequence of, success.

Most people will never have a thousand – let alone millions – of followers. But they’ve probably felt some hints of audience entanglement in their relatively banal online lives: the addictive siren’s call of rechecking a post as the “likes” roll in, or an idyllic afternoon with your kid ruined by a snarky comment from an internet stranger.

While countless influencers offer tips for growing online audiences, little training exists for how to actually deal with managing the stress of having large followings.

Previously, only the truly famous – actors, rock stars, pro athletes – were at risk of experiencing the anxiety of public scrutiny.

Now, many of us are just one viral post away from its grasp.

Julianna Pillemer, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, New York University

Remembering Yayoi Kusama: "The Only Method I have Found that Relieved my Illness is to Keep Creating Art"

Portrait of Yayoi Kasuma with pumpkin (2010). Photograph courtesy of Ota Fine Arts Tokyo Singapore Shanghai, Victoria Miro, London, David Swirner, New York. Cover picture of Hermes AW26 in Los Angeles by Max Farago. 

By Sasha Grishin

In the history of the National Gallery of Victoria, their most successful ticketed exhibition did not feature the work of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet or Pablo Picasso. It was of the late, veteran Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama. Held over the summer months in 2024–25, the Melbourne exhibition attracted 570,537 ticketed visitors.

Yayoi Kusuma in her room at

her parents home in Matsumoto,

circa 1957. Courtesy of Yayoi 

Kusama Studio, Inc.

Kusama’s exhibitions throughout the world have attracted huge crowds. Her infinity mirror rooms, sprawling seas of polka dots, dancing pumpkins and huge expanses of reflective surfaces have become some of the most photographed art objects in human history.

Her art has had a huge impact on many art movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, including pop art, performance art, minimalism, environmental art, video art, fashion, filmmaking and feminism.

A difficult childhood

Kusama was born on March 22 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, to parents who were merchants and operated a plant nursery and seed farm.

She suffered from hallucinations from childhood and by the age of ten had created paintings in watercolours, pastels and oils using polka dot and net motifs that she encountered in her visions.

She described her childhood as traumatic, with a physically abusive mother and a womanising father, and a time when her artistic endeavours were discouraged. She found refuge in her art.

Her childhood was overshadowed by World War II. By the time she was 13, she was sewing parachutes for Japanese soldiers and was aware of American bombers flying overhead and of constant air-raid sirens. She attended Arigasaki High School and, in 1948, studied Nihonga painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts.

By 1950, Kusama was exhibiting in Japan, to some acclaim, her sprawling paintings, mainly on paper, of abstracted natural forms and would cover all surfaces – floors, walls, ceilings and naked assistants with polka dots that she would term “infinity nets”.

Concerning her painting, Flower (D.S.P.S), 1954, she wrote:

One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space and be reduced to nothingness.

The heart of the art scene

In 1957, Yayoi Kusama travelled to the United States and settled in New York. She was at the heart of the American post-war art movement where she exhibited to considerable applause large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures using mirrors and electric lights.

In the 1960s, she staged many happenings, such as body painting festivals, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations.

It has been argued that her work had a profound impact on artists, including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol.

She was also involved in film productions and newspaper publication.

In 1968, the film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, that Kusama produced and in which she played the leading role, won a prize at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium and the Second Maryland Film Festival and the second prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

She held exhibitions and staged happenings in various countries in Europe and participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, where she exhibited her Narcissus Garden comprising of hundreds of mirrored spheres.

(Narcissus Garden entered the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in 2024, in its new iteration of 1,400 stainless steel balls, each 30cm in diameter.)

The artist’s physical and mental health deteriorated while she was in America and she attempted suicide.

For her, her art was the path to salvation.

A return to Japan

Kusama returned to Japan to live there permanently in 1973.

After experiencing a further suicide attempt, in 1977 she admitted herself into the Tokyo psychiatric institute, the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, from which she was never discharged.

She lived in the hospital and made daily excursions to her studio where she maintained a frenetic pace of work.

Yayoi Kusama was one of the most acclaimed artists of her time. A major retrospective exhibition of her work held in 1998 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

There were also major retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York, and Tate Modern, London, in 2012, and at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC in 2017. In 2017, the Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo.

Commercially, her work achieved record prices and she has received various awards for her novels, poetry and films.

In an interview with Infinity Net in 2012, Yayoi Kusama said:

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieved my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.

Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University