So I guess during your Christmas shopping experiences, you will have wondered around department stores, and perfume shops, and this may have caught your eye.
Yes, that red and black perfume ‘Dot’ by Marc Jacobs. You may have infact purchased it as a gift, in turn received it as a present. But I would like to share the story behind those dots, a story that I was told by my lecturer at university.
Marc Jacobs created this perfume after meeting Yayoi Kusama and he felt incredibly inspired her and her artwork. Kusama wasborn 1929 and is a Japanese artist and writer. She is famous for her fight for sexual liberation in the USA and demand to cease the Vietnam War. This demand lead her to write a letter to the President, offering to sleep with him if he ends it.
However, through her art and her protests, dots began to infect her work. When she left the USA in 1973 to return to Japan, she witnessed the death of her friend Joseph Cornell and in the following year, her father’s. After helplessly watching these events, she herself attempts suicide. After her failed attempt, she admits herself to a psychiatric institution. This is where she has fought against her desire to commit suicide by painting dots everyday for the last 40 years.
(1998)
(2004)
So The Kusama, these dots are fundamental to her existence. They mean so much more than the designs of the perfume bottle or the visual merchandising for Louis Vuitton or Selfridges.
It’s funny really, how you walk into a shop and you are blinded by consumerism. It is sad to think millions of people have bought that perfume or walked past the the window displays and the message behind those dots is lost. So by writing this blog, I hope people are enlightened by the power of those dots. I certainly am.