Yayoi Kusama's Chapeau II (2000) takes a wide-brimmed hat as its central subject and covers every element — crown, brim, hatband — in a different pattern, the object rendered in magenta and gold against a vivid green ground that fills the surrounding field with a black-outlined network of irregular shapes. The hat sits at the centre, its rounded crown in magenta covered in gold dots scaling from small at the top to large circles across the broadest section, the brim curving outward on both sides in the same colour combination, the hatband rendered in blue with a grid of rectangular marks that introduces a third distinct system into the image. The hat is wide and low, its brim almost touching the edges of the green field, the whole object given a presence that is at once domestic and slightly absurd — a hat that no one could wear, its surface too busy, too jewelled, too insistent.

The connection to fashion is direct. Kusama arrived in New York in 1957 wearing clothes she had made herself, and fashion remained a thread running through her output across the following decade. In 1968 she staged happenings in which participants were dressed — or undressed — in her dot-covered clothing, the body itself becoming a surface for the pattern.

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