Yayoi Kusama Shoe & Hat Prints For Sale

Kusama's interest in shoes and hats as print subjects grew out of a fashion practice she had been building since the 1960s, long before either object appeared in her editions. She launched her own fashion company in 1968 and opened a boutique in New York the following year, selling dresses and accessories covered in the same dots and cut-out patterns she was using in her paintings and soft sculptures at the time. She had also spent years appearing at gallery openings in kimonos and carrying a parasol, a deliberate performance that played with and pushed back against the exoticised image of Japanese femininity that Western audiences expected of her. By the time hats and shoes entered her print work in the early 1980s, starting with pieces like Hat Left Behind in Field in 1981, fashion had already been part of her artistic vocabulary for two decades, which makes the series feel less like a departure into a new subject and more like a return to territory she had been working in all along.

The prints treat both objects less as accessories and more as sculptural forms in their own right, isolating a single hat or a pair of heels against a patterned ground and covering the object itself in the same dots and netting that appear across her wider practice. Hats from the series often carry decorative details, bows, brooches, and wide brims, that Kusama renders in flat, saturated colour rather than any attempt at realistic texture, while the shoe prints tend to focus on the high heel specifically, a shape she returns to often enough across paintings, sculpture and print that it functions almost as a companion motif to the pumpkin. Read alongside her own history of dressing in exaggerated, self-designed clothing throughout her career, the prints carry a slightly autobiographical charge, an artist who has always used her own image and wardrobe as material, now applying that same instinct to the accessories rather than the garment.

Kusama's hat and shoe prints were produced as screenprints through the same Japanese studios she relied on for her other editions of the period, with works like Hat (Red) and Hat (Yellow), both from 1983, issued in editions of 100, and Shoes, from 1985, following the same edition size and screenprint technique. Each is signed, numbered and dated by Kusama herself, consistent with how her other print series from this period were documented and issued.

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