Yayoi Kusama's Shoes I (1985) places a pair of red high-heeled court shoes on a deep black ground covered in a teal network of small leaf-like marks — the shoes vivid and present against the dark field, each one covered in multiple distinct marking systems that treat every surface of the object as a separate formal problem. The shoes are red with orange along the heel and upper edge, white dots of varying sizes scattered across the toe and body of each shoe, a small bow on the front rendered in purple and yellow. The heel is covered in a different sequence of marks from the upper, the toe in a finer dot arrangement, the bow in its own colour combination — the shoe described not as a unified object but as a collection of zones, each one receiving the same systematic attention.

The two shoes are placed side by side at slightly different angles, the image suggesting they have been set down rather than arranged, the informality of their placement giving the image a quality of something encountered rather than staged. The connection to fashion runs deep in Kusama's practice. In New York in the late 1960s she designed polka-dot clothing, opened a fashion boutique, and staged happenings in which participants were dressed in her dot-covered garments — the body itself becoming a surface for the pattern.

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