A Bathing Ape

[honcho]

thought this might interest some on this forum:

With BAPE hotel wishes, BAPE Café New York dreams, and a new London boutique finally a reality, A Bathing Ape creator Nigo is the next self-appointed fashion ambassador for trendy Tokyoites. But is the rest of the planet ready for this simian-inspired lifestyle? Roland Kelts gets the answer from the man himself.

At 32, Nigo, designer, producer, drummer and DJ is still a bit of a boy-wonder. He's small, for one thing, in frame and in head-size, with a skullcap hiding his hairline and massive Ray-Bans encasing bulging wide eyes. He also slumps thoughtfully then jerks to attention, like a preoccupied teenager with a lot on the brain.

More boy-wonderish, however, is Nigo's hyperkinetic enthusiasm for his chosen obsession: transforming his homegrown street-wear business into a worldwide empire. “I don't consider my brand merely a clothing brand,” he explains in a soft but certain voice. “BAPE is a lifestyle company, including music, hair, even food. Everything you need to live. Tokyo has all sorts of brands. They have a boom period, then they subside. I don't want my brand to be dragged down, so I need to diversify.”

In the beginning

Nigo is the maestro behind BAPE (“BAPE-ee”), the clothing brand he launched 10 years ago, incorporating simian images and hip-hop-inspired fashions into the now-ubiquitous array of camouflage motifs that appear on clothes, accessories, furniture, action figures, buses, Pepsi cans—and plastic tape. Nigo expertly cultivated his “underground” reputation by applying an age-old marketing tactic: limited editions. His hard-to-find, carefully stitched duds draw famously long lines to BAPE's Tokyo outlets, which themselves are hard-to-find, tucked into cul-de-sacs and often bearing no shop signs other than “Nowhere Ltd.,” the name of Nigo's corporation, minutely lettered somewhere on the glass. In Tokyo's maze of oversized and often meaningless neons, Nigo found his niche with “Nowhere.”

“Originally I took an underground approach,” he admits, “because in Japan, people want to believe that something is special. But also,” he adds, breaking into a conspiratorial smile, “I really didn't want a lot of people wearing my clothes.”

The contradiction is revealing. Aside from the quality of the clothing (every BAPE T-shirt is expertly stitched, the ape-head logo often discreetly positioned on a small tag), what has made Nigo and his now diverse array of products such compelling presences has been their inaccessibility—especially in Japan, the land of convenience, where 24-hr everythings ensure that you can always get what you want.

But a decade is an eternity in the worlds of pop and commercial culture, let alone the youth-fashion business in fad-mad Tokyo. To avoid having his brand “dragged down,” Nigo has methodically planned his expansion to be all-inclusive, with lifestyle-oriented largesse. BAPE now boasts 25 outlets, including a BAPE CUTS hair salon, BAPE café and gallery, a members-only store in Hong Kong, and a brand new boutique in central London, which opened in the Fall of 2002. There is also a record label, APE SOUNDS, which grew out of his collaboration with England's Mo' Wax founder, James Lavelle, and BAPE TV (now broadcasting on Space Shower for two hours on the last Sunday of every month). On the horizon: a New York outlet and café next year, and someday, a Tokyo-based BAPE hotel.

“The hotel is my dream,” he says. “It's a very difficult project, and it might stay a dream, but that's what I want.”

Nigo limited

Diversification is textbook business management, of course, but Nigo's approach has been strikingly effective for one reason: the brainchild behind the most playful clothes on the planet has retained his rarefied underground status, despite marketing tie-ups with Pepsi, the odd TV commercial for Sony and World Wrestling Entertainment, and most recently, his bold reach across the dateline to appeal to Western consumers.

“I guess I'm not interested in [developing business in] Asia anymore. Ten or 15 years ago, the previous generation was happy just purchasing goods from the US or Europe. But my generation wants to be the creative center. We want to make what's new right here in Tokyo, and spread it to the world.”

Nigo applies a draconian hand to the scales of supply and demand. Customers are asked to purchase only one piece of a given product line, and only clothing that matches their sizes. This is partly to limit black-market sales. But it also preserves the aura of mystique that shrouds both the products and their hitherto media-shy maker.

Nigo has sustained this aura ever since the launch of the first “BUSY WORKSHOP,” a tiny storefront he opened in 1993. “I wasn't getting paid in those days. I just did it for fun.” He was freshly out of Fashion College, where he studied fashion editing, not design, and earned his keep as a stylist and editor for Popeye magazine. “I still write today, because I enjoy it. But now I get to write about my own collections.”

A true veteran of Ura-Harajuku, Nigo grows unusually nostalgic when discussing the old days. “I have really good memories. There weren't as many people in Harajuku back then. The store would close at eight, and all my friends would come around just to hang out and talk. We can't do that anymore. It's too crowded.”

Clearly, Nigo is one of the key reasons why today's Harajuku is less like a salon than an overstuffed supermarket for fashion victims. From the mid-'90s, Tokyo's hippest teens and 20-somethings began to go ape in every aspect, bearing Nigo's logos and motifs from head to toe, and toting his “BUSY WORKS” bags, incongruously featuring an ape head sandwiched between the circular signs for two of New York City's Westside subway lines, above the words, “Transit Authority.”

“I love New York,” he explains. “It's on a different scale from any other city in the world. It's an inspiration to me.” Nigo is also one of the top three collectors of Star Wars memorabilia in the world (“just the old stuff”), and, not surprisingly the fifth largest of Planet of the Apes mementos, and he visits toy shows in New York to get the goods onsite. Honmura-an, the SoHo soba eatery (with another branch in Ogikubo), and the celebrity-riddled Mr. Chow's in midtown are his favorite restaurants—but he hopes to open his BAPE café in decidedly funkier Chelsea.

“I've listened to hip-hop since 1984, and I was always drawn to the New York style. It's my favorite city.”

With pals and fans like superstar DJs Cornelius and Takagi Kan, Undercover designer Jun Takahashi, England's Ian Brown and Bob Gillespie of Primal Scream, Australia's Ben Lee, and New York's The Beastie Boys and graffiti genius Futura 2000 on his side, Nigo's rise has been as meteoric and influential as that of his adopted neighborhood. He debuted APE SOUNDS in 2000, with help from Lavelle and the Mo' Wax label, and serves as a producer/director for his CDs, amassing numerous influences and musical talents and blending Western hip-hop with an Asian collage-making sensibility. (A kind of “down-to-earth Beck,” as one critic opined.)

“James is a good friend and he loves Japan,” Nigo says of Lavelle. “He's a representative of London's new generation, the way I am a representative of Tokyo's.”

Brand of nonsense

Nigo's opinion of the younger generation he claims to represent offers a rare insight into the philosophical paradox at the heart of his rising empire. The man who uses “BUSY WORKS” as a label is, in fact, quite busy. He describes himself as “a bit of a loner” who works all the time, though “my work doesn't feel like work to me. I feel like I have a lot of free time because I love what I do.”

when asked to comment on today's youths, the so-called “freeters” and the teeming masses of brand-crazed consumers who are his chief patrons, Nigo pauses and looks troubled, his brow lowering. “The freeters like freedom,” he begins, “so they find whatever job they can get and move on. But there will be problems in the future. Even people around me now—there are many who haven't got it together, who can't get going job-wise. I'm pretty negative about the future for them.”

The very phrase that constitutes Nigo's BAPE logo, “A Bathing Ape,” has telling origins. “It's from the Japanese expression: ‘To bathe in lukewarm water' (Nuruma-yu-ni-tsukaru), and it's a comment on kids in Tokyo today. They're very shallow; they take things for granted, and they're not street savvy. It's sort of ironic for them to be wearing my clothing. I'm trying to show how they are incapable of being independent-minded. They have no plans, no goals, because they're just too comfortable. Like bathing in lukewarm water.”

It's an irony apparently lost on those kids, who parade just beyond Nigo's back-alley offices and storefronts bearing his logos, motifs and labels while their creator buzzes with ideas and activity both here and abroad. To watch Nigo hovering over a conveyor belt of sneakers and shoes in one of his outlets, carefully positioning and repositioning the goods so that they gleam pristinely beneath soft-glow lamps, is to understand Nigo's admixture of lordly control and personal, hands-on engagement. Willy Wonka and the clothing factory.

“I have a very meticulous personality, and maybe that's partly a Japanese trait,” he confesses, citing his mother and father, a nurse and a billboard sign-maker respectively, as major influences in the development of his character, and DJ/Head Porter designer Hiroshi Fujiwara, a generation older and one of Japan's earliest hip-hop jockeys, as his business model. (Nigo literally means “number two” in Japanese; a Harajuku shopkeeper coined the moniker when he noted the physical resemblance between the two designers 10 years ago.)

One final irony: Nigo's obsessive, detail-oriented solemnity results in clothes that are most notable for being…fun. BAPE wear features surprises to delight a childlike curiosity—untuck a pocket in a pair of jeans and voila!, there's the tiny ape-head on the inner lining. Hold a short-sleeve button-down shirt sideways and stare into the camouflage for a few minutes: “BAPE” is spelled out, embedded in the pattern like a Rorschach inkblot.

When I suggest that his clothes are like toys, Nigo nods approvingly. “You know, they had Rockabilly style in the '50's, Mods in the '60's and Punk in the '70s. Obviously, I haven't risen that high yet, but I'd like there to be a music-fashion connection: Ape-inspired themes, images and sounds for an entire generation.”

Heady ambitions for a kid from rural Gunma, who has clearly made good on his own goals: he now sports a shiny silver Bentley in the drive of his three-story Sendagaya office complex, showrooms and studios. Amid the BAPE wear Nigo himself dons, there’s one item that stands out: a kind of jagged, cartoonish lightning bolt design in the form of a pendant dangling from his neck and an imprint in the side of his skullcap.

“It's called ‘the BAPE star,' and it's my symbol—Nigo, aka BAPE star,” says Nigo, smiling broadly: “I'm expressing myself with this. It's all about me.”

[Daveheadhunt]

hype! hype! hype! and NO substance!!!

[sex_on_heels]

i like the bape jackets and pants 8) its different

[Kweli]

what is substance clothes-wise? please tell me, i'm thrilled

[Daveheadhunt]

Originally Posted by Kweli

what is substance clothes-wise? please tell me, i'm thrilled

Substance = quality of materials, thought-process in design and shape ergonomics. the problem is most brands these days give no thought to substance and just think in terms of hype and how much they can screw the customer for. sad but true!

[dumberer]

bape aint just hype :!: bape is the real deal.

[Kweli]

Then you clearly don't know what you are talking about. bape as amazing quality, best tees and sneakers in terms of quality than any other brand i have seen. and i'm not talking only about streetwear

[Daveheadhunt]

Originally Posted by Kweli

Then you clearly don't know what you are talking about. bape as amazing quality, best tees and sneakers in terms of quality than any other brand i have seen. and i'm not talking only about streetwear

were gonna disagree on that one but even nigo confesses his brand is all about generating reaction. in other words hype.