Hype Machine

Bape recently opened its flagship Middle East store in Dubai Mall. Here’s a brief history of how the Japanese brand became an international streetwear major.

- Varun Godinho

Drop culture. Leftfield collaborations. Cult-level community building. A pedantic influencer strategy. If you thought these were pioneered and aced recently by streetwear giants like Supreme, Off-White and Palace Skateboards, think again.

It was a one-man hype machine from Tokyo in the Nineties who is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for shaping how we consider, consume and market streetwear today.

In 1993, Nigo – real name Tomoaki Nagao – opened a shop called Nowhere in Tokyo’s hip Ura-Harajuku district. Soon, he introduced his own label called A Bathing Ape – or Bape – that brought streetwear with attitude to the forefront. In fact, the name of the brand itself was a jibe to the elite (Nigo’s father was a metal fabricator and mother a nurse) as the Japanese phrase ‘a bathing ape in lukewarm water’ refers to brats living sheltered lives.

Some of Nigo’s earliest creations were the iconic shark tees, a product that is still retailed even today. In those early days of Bape, Nigo would create just 50 T-shirts a week and then offer up only half of them for sale. The idea was that not more than 10 per cent of those who wanted a Bape got their hands on one. Like so many streetwear collectables, when they were gone, they stayed gone. What Nigo did with the other half of the weekly collection was equally important. He would smartly seed it with creatives and influencers in Tokyo thereby ensuring that the clothes became desirable statement pieces.