Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama: AR, Ultra-Architecture & Animatronic OOH

With digital advertising costs increasing by 42% last year (Adskate, 2022), many businesses are supercharging out-of-home marketing. In particular, luxury companies are taking on a tourist attraction role – delivering public spectacles that present a palatable sense of joyful extravagance during the cost-of-living crisis. 

The campaign, which was in partnership with British creative agency Closer, consisted of:

• Augmented Brandscapes: Taking the project to its global destinations, Louis Vuitton used Snap’s Landmarker lens feature to detect landmarks. It projected digital overlays of Kusama’s patterns onto notable monuments, including the Statue of Liberty (New York), National Gallery (London), and Arc de Triomphe (Paris). See also, Giorgio Armani’s AR ‘Love’ installations at Miami Art Week 2022.
  
  
• Robotic Replica: A life-sized Kusama replica at Louis Vuitton’s Fifth Avenue flagship in New York, which ‘paints’ polka dots onto its store window, has been widely shared across social media, with ‘Louis Vuitton Robot’ garnering over 90 million views on TikTok.
  
  
• Architectural Additions: Louis Vuitton’s Champs-Élysées flagship in Paris and London luxury department store Harrods both play host to a large-scale Kusama installation, which towers over their façades. As in New York, the replica ‘paints’ the stores.
  
  
• Boundless Billboards: In December, the brands teased the collaboration with a billboard on Tokyo’s Cross Shinjuku Vision (a 150 sq m screen broadcasting 3D videos). The anamorphic display shows Louis Vuitton’s famous trunk cracked open, with Kusama (wearing her recurring pumpkin motif as a hat) seemingly leaning out of the frame and peering onto the street below.