Yayoi Kusama's Hat (1982) places a wide-brimmed white hat with a yellow hatband and green feathers against a red field filled with a dense structure of red and white irregular shapes — the hat itself in a different system of black-outlined white irregular shapes, the feathers in yellow-green with their own line vocabulary, the whole image framed by a black border carrying white dots at regular intervals. The hat is rendered in a large-scale structure of black lines on white — the shapes bigger and more open than the tight dot sequences of the pumpkin works, the crown and brim described through a mosaic-like arrangement that gives the object a stained-glass quality, each section of the hat a distinct white area outlined in black. The yellow hatband runs across the centre in a warm amber tone with red lines across it, the green feathers rising to the right in a finer structure of green lines on yellow-green.

The red field behind presses in from every direction in a dense arrangement of red shapes outlined in white — a different scale and character from the hat's own structure, the two systems creating a clear distinction between object and setting. The hat works of the early 1980s sit at a specific moment in fashion history — the decade when Japanese designers were reshaping Paris, when Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo were proposing a completely different relationship between clothing and the body, between garment and wearer. Kusama's engagement with fashion accessories across this period belongs to the same cultural conversation from a different angle — not the deconstructed garment but the accessory submitted to a structure that makes the personal object strange, the familiar item transformed by the insistence of the pattern into something that refuses easy consumption.

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