Laddism and Luxury: Staging Masculinity in Louis Vuitton x Kusama’s Fashion Imagery

Magazine Photography Project: A 22-page special cover story in collaboration with French luxury brand Louis Vuitton, exploring its artistic partnership with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Published in Numéro Berlin (May 2024), magazine cover + pp. 212-233.

This project examines the intersection of high-end fashion and contemporary masculinity, focusing on how Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with Kusama—a figure associated with avant-garde art and obsessive repetition—interacts with ideas of laddism and rave culture. The visual narrative reinterprets the brand’s iconography through the lens of UK club subcultures, interrogating the performance of heterosexual masculinity in nightlife spaces.

Drawing on the aesthetics of 1990s and early 2000s rave scenes, the project explores how male identity is staged in clubs—through aggression, camaraderie, and self-display—and how luxury fashion enters these traditionally working-class spaces. The representation of the “lad” as both a hyper-masculine figure and an object of desire is central to the series, reflecting on the ways in which brands like Louis Vuitton engage with subcultural codes while simultaneously transforming them into commodities. By merging Kusama’s surrealist, polka-dot motifs with the raw energy of rave culture, the images blur the boundaries between art, fashion, and masculinity in contemporary visual culture.

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