PUNK BUDDHAS: COUTURE

A Punk Buddha sits like any figure of meditation: legs crossed, eyes closed, one hand raised before the heart. Then the eye travels up.

The crest climbs from the brow over the crown: green, then red, then a spike of blue.

Turn him, and the spikes open into a ring. Atash ties them to the punk rock she grew up with; in profile, and in the shadows they throw, they read as a halo.

“I used to be punk rock when I was a teenager,” she says. “Every generation has its own music direction, its own vibe, and for me it was punk rock in the early '90s. That's what I grew up with, Misfits, Sex Pistols, Ramones.”

See a punk's mohawk

From behind, the crest runs on down to the nape in single stones, and the dots continue all the way round.

Look between the dots. Beneath them, in paler gold stones, run the flowers of the Louis Vuitton monogram.

Three houses, three signatures: Chanel's tweed, Saint Laurent's Mondrian and Louis Vuitton's monogram, each laid stone by stone over the same seated figure.

In August 1965 Yves Saint Laurent showed cocktail dresses cut from Piet Mondrian's grid, the jersey pieced so that no seam shows; one of them made the cover of French Vogue that September.

Saint Laurent Mondrian (2025) wears the grid in about 40,000 crystals and signs the house's name across the knees. See the dresses in 1966

Louis Vuitton covered its bags and its shop windows in Yayoi Kusama's dots twice, in 2012 and again in 2023. Kusama, who died in August 2026 at the age of ninety-seven, made the polka dot her lifelong signature.

Kusama Vuitton (2025) scatters dots of red, green, yellow, blue and white over the monogram's bronze.

For the Love of Fashion: Coco Chanel (2021), since sold, is the same house at twice the scale: thirty-six inches tall and about 130,000 crystals. Camellias, Chanel's flower, run down the jacket, and the sleeves take the black and white stripes of the sailor's jersey Gabrielle Chanel wore herself.

See Chanel in her sailor's jersey, 1928

Punkbuddha, Love Is All, a tribute to Pablo Picasso in about 140,000 crystals and since sold, is one of the largest Punk Buddhas the gallery has shown. Women from Picasso's portraits fill the front of the robe.

On the back sleeps the woman of Picasso's The Dream, painted in 1932: head tipped onto her shoulder, hands folded in her lap, a red armchair behind her.

You Are Fired (2025) is the odd one out: a round, laughing figure in gold crystal, the form Chinese tradition knows as Budai, the Laughing Buddha. One finger points up, the other hand makes the circle of thumb and forefinger, and two words are stamped across chest and back.

“You can look at everything through two lenses,” Atash says, “happy/sad, good/bad, ugliness/beauty. It's all about the feeling.”

Turn him around and the stamp is there again, above her emblem.