What/to whom does art belong to?

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Lady Aiko’s feminine, playful, and bold style is crucial to her internationally-renowned oeuvre, as it reflects her identity as a female Japanese street artist and showcases her appreciation for the animated love and passion people show to one another and their respective ‘street’. After more than twenty years of living in the United States, Aiko’s Japanese traditional technique and aesthetic effortlessly blends with the essence of American contemporary art movements such as abstractionism, pop art, and graffiti. Aiko explains that her own artistic genius thrives wherever the unharnessed thrill of tagging is fueled by the uncertainty and uncontrollability offered by open city streets (Widewalls). As a consequence, her style reflects the chaotic yet electrifying nature of being vulnerable to the public eye, exposing her experience as a Japanese-American woman to the elements of popular culture and convention. Aiko’s “joyous femininity” makes her one of the most influential and popular street artists in the world, as it not only motivates her to create street art that rivals wildly famous male taggers like Banksy, but it also allows her to challenge the stereotypically hostile and vulgar aesthetic of graffiti (Vincent). Aiko tags the love of her Japanese identity and feminine brilliance onto concrete, stenciling pink butterflies, brushing blossoming flowers, and spraying whimsical women in Kyron. She tags across the world, transcending class and geopolitical boundaries as the democratization of graffiti counters the elitist and exclusionary nature of fine art. Lady Aiko’s work acknowledges that street art’s ideological provocation is exposed to the world’s eye: she proudly celebrates romance, emotion, and sexuality, inspiring women across the globe to push against the status quo as Aiko challenges the aggressively masculine dominance of graffiti.

 

Just as Aiko utilizes the publicity of street art to convey female empowerment, the fashion industry embraces street art both as an aesthetic template and a marketing opportunity, championing craftsmanship of a limited, unique, and raw experience. Brands capitalize on the novel social connection between the two worlds of fashion and graffiti, for both hold significant political and social power in pop culture: their activist and confrontational essence object conventional aesthetics in a loud, public manner. Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic, argues that commodification and commercialization are why fashion and street art are made for each other, as “the beginnings of modern street art lie in a fusion of art, youth, culture, pop and fashion in 1980s New York” (Graziame). High-end fashion brands that commercialize street art either through apparel production or marketing seamlessly bridge the gap between outsider and insider culture, employing mass merchandising strategy to further democratize an already public art form (Monlár, 2018). This constructs the cultural ethos of the brand itself, building consumer value as the luxury brand appears less haughty and arrogant to audiences since it’s supposedly in-tune with the avant-garde and countercultural essence of graffiti. Fashion’s glamorous cooptation of informality contrasts the ephemeral and unauthorized aesthetic of street art that historically denotes situational artwork that spites the status quo – unless it’s printed on a $600 scarf from the most established luxury brand in the world. To many graffiti artists, this commercialization of street art erodes the authenticity of urban countercultural expression and the integrity of the artist, as the democratic nature of street art is warped by capitalist motive.

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However, this collaboration between an established brand and street art provides Lady Aiko a means to push back against the masculine essence of graffiti, creating a platform for femininity in urban counterculture. The Louis Vuitton x AIKO Spring Summer Collection (LV x AIKO) conditionalizes street art’s nature of ‘art to the people’ in that only upper-class consumers can showcase or wear Aiko’s art. This collaboration emphasizes how street art can be viewed by any audience, but reveals the cultural authority and capitalistic superiority in who or what may have the privilege to display a work art. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that publicity harnesses the nature in which a work of art transcends physical beauty, provoking a sense of superiority: “[A work of art] denotes wealth and spirituality: it implies that the purchase being proposed is both a luxury and a cultural value” (135). This sense of cultural power and affluence is physically embodied by the LV x AIKO scarf. Through the exclusivity of the luxury brand and the scarf’s extremely limited accessibility, only a specific consumer is able to convey Lady Aiko’s vibrant feminine power and cultural confidence – and, uncoincidentally, the dominant consumers of scarves are traditionally female. Aiko collaborated with a luxury brand on a silk scarf: an extremely feminine accessory whose impracticality makes it that more ‘girly’. The cultural power of the scarf’s consumer is maximized by the nature of the purchase, as the consumer is strictly investing in the artistic value of the piece. Lady Aiko’s lively, hybrid style shines through a kaleidoscope of vivacity and empowerment onto the print of the scarf, making the piece more of a super-feminine signifier of class and culture rather than of arrogance and pretentiousness. The print assumes that the consumer is culturally and socially affluent, connoting that the ‘privilege to showcase’ Aiko’s street art exclusively wraps around the neck of a she-boss whose taste and lifestyle are opulently refined. The luxury print supports a story of female empowerment, as it is worn by an accomplished woman whose presumable success is admirable and attractive to those she passes by. At the same time, this luxury platform supports Aiko’s push for femininity in urban counterculture, as her street art and its vivacious aesthetic are endorsed by an internationally-established fashion designer.

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Lady Aiko’s creative energy, kitsch style, and activist passion seamlessly translate from concrete wall to scarf print, as the LV x AIKO collaboration – through the capitalist structure of luxury markets – reinforces her brand as a proud Japanese street artist-a. Historically seen as a countercultural response to commercially-induced alienation, street art’s populist aesthetic poses a creative challenge to consumerism and urban development by ‘reclaiming’ economically abandoned streets to their proper ‘owners’ (Borghini et al., 2010). Lady Aiko redefines this convention, as 4 Seasons re-appropriates the blank space created by the exclusionary and elitist aesthetics of Louis Vuitton apparel as a platform to incorporate femininity into street art. The collaboration combines urban transgressive cultural activity, highly established art, and commercial design, traversing the boundaries of these fields as “global meets local ethos” (Monlár, 2018). The scarf features Lady Aiko’s internationally-recognized hybrid of American contemporary art and traditional Japanese technique alongside the globally-established Louis Vuitton logo, as a poppy energy captures Aiko’s subversively feminine aesthetic in bright stencils and patterns. The scarf is saturated with her romantic and passionate affair with graffiti and the unharnessed thrill of urban culture, becoming a medium in which street art is less of a social rebellion and more of a luxury informality, serving as a vehicle for the release and empowerment of conventionally suppressed feminine energy.

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Lady Aiko’s oeuvre celebrates the nuanced role of feminine style in the contemporary art world, as her work demonstrates the elegance, power, and beauty in transcending boundaries between male and female, and between fine art and graffiti. 4 Seasons itself is literally a vivacious bloom of femininity, where a chaotic collage of kitsch prints and bold pink petals – featuring the LV monogram – literally blooms from the center of the scarf. Feminine vivacity and a passionate energy sprawls outwards from the center of four women, facing the ‘four seasons’ (represented by stenciled flowers in each the corners). To Aiko, the urban expression of romance, passion, and vitality never go out of style – the beauty of contemporary femininity is a year-round phenomenon. The organized chaos of the scarf combines elements of street art and graffiti with traditionally glamorous prints, as Aiko merges tag technique with leopard print and gold chains. She merges the international acclaim of her artwork with the renowned cultural value of the Louis Vuitton logo, further reinforcing the scarf as a luxury informality capable of driving Lady Aiko’s feminine authority in the art world.

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The Louis Vuitton x AIKO Spring Summer Collection challenges the status quo in a form of artistic chaos, emphasizing the romance between activist intention and urban consumption. The collaboration creates an innovative hybrid of urban countercultural expression and upper-echelon glamour, reinforcing Lady Aiko’s stake in the Global Street Art Movement as a female figure. Aiko’s collaboration with such a glamorous and established brand utilizes the commercialization of graffiti to perfectly capture her activist expression within the seams of a scarf. Street art’s commercial transformation from an illegal defacement of property to an established and highly legitimate art form creates more space for Aiko to advance her empowering agenda. As demonstrated by 4 Seasons, Lady Aiko utilizes the popular and capitalistic appreciation of street art – and the informalities that accomplish it – to push back against the masculine dominance of graffiti and to create more space for herself as a street artist.