A Bathing Ape: The Making of Nigo's Empire, 1993 to Today

On 1 April 1993 two young men who had met at Bunka opened a small shop in the back lanes of Jingumae and called it Nowhere. One half held Jun Takahashi's Undercover; the other held what his friend Tomoaki Nagao, already known as Nigo, had chosen: American clothing, deadstock sneakers and, before long, T-shirts printed with an ape's head. Within twelve years that second half had become a label with its own buildings in Tokyo, London and New York, a cartoon cast, a sneaker and a camouflage recognised across the world. Within eighteen it had been sold for about US$2.8 million. The story of A Bathing Ape is the story of how a deliberately small supply created an enormous appetite, and of what happened when the business grew past the man who designed it.

1 April 1993: a shop called Nowhere

Nigo was born Tomoaki Nagao on 23 December 1970 in Maebashi, north-west of Tokyo. He met Jun Takahashi in 1990, when both were studying at Bunka, the Tokyo fashion college that had trained a generation of Japanese designers. Takahashi, who had enrolled in 1988, sang in a punk cover band while he studied; Nigo was a collector of American clothes, records and sneakers. Three years later they pooled what they had and opened Nowhere in Ura-Harajuku, the quiet grid of lanes between the Harajuku and Aoyama avenues. The fuller story of those lanes, and of why they produced so many labels at once, is told in The Anatomy of Ura-Harajuku.

Two halves of one room

Nowhere was a single small space divided in two. On one side hung Undercover, the label Takahashi was building into one of the most respected names in Japanese fashion (his later path, including the Paris debut of October 2002, is traced in Jun Takahashi and Undercover: A Life in Collections). On the other side were Nigo's selections: new American designs, vintage pieces and deadstock trainers. Nigo's curated stock did not sell well at first. His answer was to make something of his own.

What it took to open

How much money opened the door is one of the details that the record does not settle. In a 2009 interview cited by later histories, the opening budget is put at a very modest sum, roughly four thousand dollars at today's rates; another account from the same year has Nigo borrowing about ten times as much from an acquaintance who also lent him the premises. What both versions share is the scale: a shop opened by two young men without a backer, in a side street, with stock they could carry.

The Fujiwara apprenticeship

Neither Nowhere nor A Bathing Ape makes sense without Hiroshi Fujiwara, the DJ, writer and designer whose taste shaped Tokyo street culture in the late 1980s. His circle, his labels and the younger designers he encouraged are the subject of The Fujiwara Orbit; here the point is narrower. Nigo was a devoted reader and viewer of Fujiwara's work long before he knew him, and it was Takahashi who made the introduction.

A column called Last Orgy

In the late 1980s Fujiwara wrote a monthly column called Last Orgy in the street-culture magazine Takarajima. It moved between new rap and punk records, films, skateboards, sneakers and DJ equipment, and it later became a series of late-night television videos documenting Harajuku. Nigo, Collater.al records, taped every episode. Once he met Fujiwara he became his assistant, and the magazine Popeye later handed a successor column, The Last Orgy 2, to Nigo and Takahashi to edit together. Fujiwara also helped fund Nowhere. The magazines that carried this culture to the rest of Japan are surveyed in The Magazine Rack.

The second Fujiwara

The name Nigo comes from this period. The story goes that a shop assistant who noticed how closely the young man resembled his idol called him "Fujiwara Hiroshi number 2". The "number two" stuck, and Tomoaki Nagao became Nigo. It is a telling origin for a designer whose whole method would be built on admiration, quotation and an encyclopaedic memory for other people's objects.

Naming an ape

With the graphic designer Sk8thing, a friend from the same circle, Nigo began producing his own pieces in 1993. Sk8thing helped shape the early concept and graphics; he would later co-found the label 40% Against Rights with Tetsu Nishiyama of WTAPS.

Planet of the Apes and lukewarm water

The name has two origins, both given by Nigo himself in a 2006 CNN interview. The first is the film Planet of the Apes (1968). The second is a Japanese phrase about an ape bathing in lukewarm water, an image of comfort and complacency that Nigo turned, with some irony, on his own generation of customers. The ape-head logo that grew from this joke became one of the most reproduced marks in street fashion.

A cartoon cast

The ape head was soon joined by characters. Baby Milo, a baby chimpanzee named after a character in the Planet of the Apes films, entered the brand in 1999, drawn by the BAPE artist Mankey under Nigo's direction. Milo became popular enough to anchor a line of its own; BAPE KIDS followed in 2006, and in 2010 Sanrio welcomed Baby Milo into its character family for its own fiftieth anniversary. The wider history of this kind of character-led pop design in Japan is set out in Japanese Pop Cool-ture Fashion: A Timeline.

Thirty T-shirts a week

The mechanism that made BAPE famous was simple, and it began by accident of size. For roughly the first two years, by his own account in 2005, Nigo produced between thirty and fifty T-shirts a week. He sold half and gave the other half to friends. Among those friends were musicians: Cornelius and the hip-hop group Scha Dara Parr wore the shirts on stage, which put the ape head in front of audiences far larger than the shop could ever reach.

Supply below demand

The arithmetic did the rest. When fifty shirts a week meet an audience that has seen them on stage and in magazines, most of the people who want one go without. Nigo did not invent limited production, and he was working alongside Takahashi, Fujiwara and others who shared the instinct. But BAPE showed more clearly than any label of its time that a small, regular, slightly unpredictable supply could make every release an event. That pattern, later called the drop, is the subject of Play as Power: Nigo, A Bathing Ape and the Irony of Harajuku.

Why the method travelled

Three conditions made it portable. The graphics were instantly legible in any language. The pieces were worn by musicians whose audiences crossed borders. And the shops, as the next sections show, were designed as places to visit rather than merely to buy, so that the address itself became part of the object's story.

Camouflage with a face

If the ape head was the signature, camouflage was the uniform. BAPE's own account dates its original camouflage series to 1996.

1996: sand yellow and olive drab

According to BAPE, the first pattern, now called 1st Camo, took the colours of American hunting camouflage and hid the ape head inside the shapes. It came in two colourways, sand yellow (Yellow Camo) and olive drab (Green Camo), and in the late 1990s camouflage rain jackets and snowboard jackets were worn by actors and artists in Japan and abroad. Look closely at an authentic 1st Camo panel and the ape faces appear in the blotches, which is the detail that turned an army print into a trademark.

The generations that followed

New patterns arrived steadily over the next two decades. The dates below follow the fullest published history of the label.

Pattern	First year	What to notice
1st Camo	1996	Sand yellow or olive drab, ape heads hidden in the shapes
ABC Camo	1996	The other founding pattern of the same year
Tiger Camo	1997	Stripes in place of blotches
Tribal Camo	2000	Graphic, tattoo-like forms
Color Camo	2004	The bright colourways of the mid-2000s
Puzzle Camo	2010	Interlocking pieces
Lizard Camo	2013	A reptile-skin reading
Space Camo	2015	Scattered stars
Splinter Camo	2018	Angular fragments
Forest Camo	2019	A woodland palette

For a collector the year of a pattern is a ceiling, not a date: a 1st Camo piece may have been made in 1996 or reissued decades later, so the label and construction have to confirm what the print suggests.

Rooms by Wonderwall

From 1998 the shops became as famous as the clothes, largely because of one designer. Masamichi Katayama, head of the Tokyo interior studio Wonderwall, has said that his first project for the brand was the Busy Work Shop in Harajuku in 1998, and that it was the first of many; designboom puts his total at more than sixty spaces created with Nigo.

Busy Work Shop, 1998

Katayama has described treating the shop as an experience, with a sequence he likened to boarding an amusement-park ride. In practice the customer moves through the space in a set order, so that buying a T-shirt feels like the end of a short journey. The original Nowhere, meanwhile, moved to Aoyama and closed in 2000.

Abroad: London and New York

The first Busy Work Shop outside Japan opened in London around 2001; the shop at 4 Upper James Street, Soho, reopened in 2009, eight years after that first overseas opening. That year Nigo explained that the Busy Work Shops were being renamed BAPE Stores "to re-group the BAPE brand". In New York the brand opened in SoHo in 2005, at 91 Greene Street, giving American customers their first chance to buy directly; a 2005 Interview magazine profile counted twenty Nigo-owned operations by then, including that new store, a sneaker shop called Foot Soldiers and a BAPE Cafe.

Bapexclusive Aoyama, 2005

The most celebrated of the rooms opened in Aoyama in July 2005. It was a plain box outside and, within, a harshly lit ground floor of white tiles under a ceiling printed with ape-head camouflage. Through a pill-shaped opening in that ceiling, trainers appear to circle overhead on a conveyor, like plates in a sushi restaurant; the effect is an illusion produced by a mirrored ceiling above a real conveyor upstairs. Few shops anywhere have expressed a brand's appetite for spectacle so exactly.

Room	City	Year	Note
Nowhere	Tokyo, Ura-Harajuku	1993	Shared with Undercover; later moved to Aoyama, closed 2000
Busy Work Shop	Tokyo, Harajuku	1998	Wonderwall's first space for the brand
Busy Work Shop	London, Soho	c. 2001	First shop outside Japan
Bapexclusive	Tokyo, Aoyama	2005	The trainer conveyor
BAPE Store	New York, SoHo	2005	91 Greene Street; first in the United States
BAPE Store	London, Soho	2009	4 Upper James Street, reopened under the new name

For readers who want to stand in these streets, A Collector's Atlas of Tokyo Boutiques maps the districts as they are today.

Sneakers, sharks and stars

The early 2000s gave BAPE the three objects most people now picture when they hear the name.

The Bape Sta

The Bape Sta took the low, rounded form of the Nike Air Force 1 and replaced the swoosh with a star crossed by a lightning bolt. Most histories date it to 2002; Sneaker Freaker places its first appearance in 2000. Its patent-leather overlays and loud colour-blocking became the look of the early 2000s, and Nike would later say that BAPE first sold such shoes in the United States in 2005. One later version became, by most accounts, the first sneaker designed by Kanye West that people could buy in a shop: the College Dropout Bape Sta, carrying the bear from his first album.

The Shark hoodie

First released in 2004, the full-zip Shark hoodie carried a shark's face, eyes and open mouth, across the hood. Nigo changed its details from season to season, which is why collectors now distinguish versions by colourway, camouflage and the small marks around the mouth. It was also among the most copied BAPE garments, a fact that matters in the collector's section below.

Collaboration as a habit

BAPE worked with friends from the start. For Spring-Summer 2005 the artist Kaws added his crossed-out XX eyes and the Bendy character to a 1st Camo trucker cap, and ape-head T-shirts followed with Kaws, with Marvel and with mastermind. Nigo's taste for collaboration ran through his whole career, and the same spirit is visible in the work of his contemporary Masaaki Homma, told in Masaaki Homma and the Skull.

Pharrell, America and the guest list

In the early 2000s the brand turned towards America. Through the jeweller Jacob Arabo, Highxtar records, Nigo met Pharrell Williams, and that friendship shaped the decade that followed.

Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream

In 2003 Nigo and Pharrell Williams launched Billionaire Boys Club and its footwear line Ice Cream. The line was made entirely in Japan, which made it expensive for its time. In the 2005 Interview magazine profile, Nigo said he would never have attempted the venture without meeting Pharrell, and offered a dry view of the imitations that followed his success: "Nobody bothers to rip off what you do unless you've succeeded."

From Tokyo cult to global uniform

The American years changed the brand's scale. The SoHo store, the celebrity clients and the colour camouflage of the mid-2000s made BAPE visible far beyond the small circle that had queued in Ura-Harajuku. For collectors this period produced many of the pieces now most sought after; it was also, as later reporting recalls, the years from 2005 to 2007 when counterfeit camouflage and Shark hoodies were everywhere, because demand far from Tokyo could not be met by a handful of shops.

Peak, debt and the sale

Popularity on that scale did not mean financial health. The figures that emerged when the company changed hands, made public in February 2011, show how far the business had outgrown its founder.

The figures

According to Nigo, annual sales peaked in 2006 to 2007 at the equivalent of about US$63 million, and stood at roughly US$55.5 million in the year to 31 August 2010. The company had net liabilities of about US$13.9 million at that date. I.T reported losses for the years to August 2009 and 2010; Nigo disputed that the business had made a loss at all, saying the accounting base was different.

Sale to I.T

The sale was announced on 1 February 2011. The Hong Kong fashion group I.T took a 90.27 percent stake in Nowhere Co. for HK$21.85 million, about US$2.8 million, and took on roughly US$52.8 million of the company's bank loans and shop leases. Nigo was candid about why.

"Basically, I can't do business. I'm not suited for it."
Nigo to WWD, February 2011, as reported by Hypebeast

He added that the brand and the company had grown too big for him to handle two or three years earlier, and that management had left him little time to design.

The departure, 2013

Nigo stayed as creative director for two more years. His contract with I.T ended on 30 April 2013, and his announcement of his departure was made public about a month later.

"This brings to a close my 20 years of work creating and designing A Bathing Ape®."
Nigo, May 2013, as reported by Complex

After the ape

Leaving the brand he had founded freed Nigo to design again, and the next thirteen years were among the most productive of his career.

Human Made

Nigo had already founded Human Made in 2010, a more grown-up label focused on workwear and craftsmanship. In 2012 he said that the clothes that inspired it represented "lost technology". On Thursday 27 November 2025 Human Made's shares began trading on the Growth Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, where demand in the offering exceeded the shares available more than sixty times and the stock closed its first day up 13 percent.

Kenzo and Galerie Vivienne

In September 2021 the LVMH-owned house Kenzo named Nigo its artistic director. He called the role "the greatest challenge of my 30-year-career" in his statement on the appointment. His first show, for Autumn-Winter 2022, was staged in January 2022 in Galerie Vivienne in Paris, the covered arcade where Kenzo Takada opened his first boutique in 1970 and held his first show. The collection included souvenir bomber jackets inspired by those American occupying forces commissioned in kimono fabrics in post-war Japan, a lineage traced in our guide to the souvenir jacket and its roots. Current pieces are gathered in the Kenzo room.

Year	Project
2003	Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream, with Pharrell Williams
2010	Human Made founded
2013	Leaves A Bathing Ape (contract ends 30 April)
2014	Creative director of Uniqlo UT
2020	Louis Vuitton capsule with Virgil Abloh
2021	Artistic director of Kenzo (from 20 September)
2022	First Kenzo show, Galerie Vivienne, Paris
2025	Human Made shares begin trading in Tokyo (27 November)
2026	Retrospective at the Design Museum, London (1 May to 4 October)

A retrospective in London

From 1 May to 4 October 2026 the Design Museum in London presented Nigo: From Japan with Love, billed as his first museum retrospective outside Japan. It followed him from 1990s Harajuku through A Bathing Ape to Kenzo, with pieces from his own collection of vintage clothing and Americana. In an interview published that spring, Nigo looked back on the brand with characteristic lightness: "Looking back at my life, Bape was actually a big mistake," he said, before adding, "But in a good way." He went on to suggest it was perhaps less a mistake than a battle he had lost.

The Nike settlement

The Bape Sta's resemblance to the Air Force 1 was eventually contested in court. In January 2023 Nike filed a trademark suit in the United States, describing five BAPE models (the Bape Sta, Bape Sta Mid, SK8 Sta, Court Sta High and Court Sta) as near copies of its designs and saying that the infringement had increased sharply after 2021. The case was settled in April 2024. According to Nike's statement, BAPE agreed to discontinue the Bape Sta Mid, Court Sta and Court Sta High, and to modify the design of the Bape Sta and SK8 Sta.

For collectors the settlement draws a line: earlier pairs carry the original form, and later ones the revised design. In 2026 Nigo released his own Air Force 1 with Nike, a "Last Orgy 2" colourway whose sail and blue were matched, Sneaker Freaker reports, to an original Nowhere shopfront sign. The circle from the back lane to the brand he once quoted closed in a single pair of shoes.

A collector's reading

For anyone building a BAPE archive, three questions come before colour or size: which era, which room, and which hand made it.

Eras that matter

The Nowhere years (1993 to the late 1990s) produced the smallest runs and the most personal graphics. The Wonderwall years (1998 to about 2005) gave the brand its rooms, its characters and its camouflage generations. The American years (about 2003 to 2010) produced the Bape Sta and Shark hoodie at their most famous and the colour camouflage that defined the decade. Pieces made after the sale of 2011 and Nigo's departure in 2013 belong to a different company, however familiar the graphics. Live pieces are presented in the BAPE room, among them a Shark MA-1 flight jacket made with Alpha Industries in grey and 1st Camo, and the wider decade is gathered in the 2000s Japanese Pop-Coolture room.

Real versus reproduction

Because the brand was so heavily copied in the mid-2000s, authentication is the collector's first discipline. Independent authentication guides concentrate on a handful of details, summarised below with two house notes on camouflage and the Bape Sta. None of them is decisive alone; together, and compared with known authentic examples, they are.

Where to look	What authentic pieces show
Neck label	Neat, durable stitching; a crisp ape-head icon; even print lines; letters aligned and clearly formed; a size font consistent with the era
Shark face (hoodies)	Correct position and size of the eyes, the shape of the mouth and the placement of the tongue
Stars and badges	Even stitch size and thickness on embroidered stars and patches
Camouflage print	Ape heads legible within the shapes; colours matching the documented colourways
Bape Sta	Star and bolt proportions, and the form appropriate to the date (pre-2024 or revised)

Condition matters as much as authenticity. Our grading follows the Japanese scale explained in Japanese Condition Ranks, Explained, and the wider culture of Japanese vintage is told in Furugi: How Japan Became the World's Vintage Capital.

Care

Screen prints and camouflage panels last longest when they are washed rarely, inside out, in cold water, and dried flat away from direct sun. Avoid the tumble dryer for printed cotton and for hoodies with appliqué or embroidered badges, and store heavy fleece folded rather than hung, so that the shoulders keep their shape. Patent leather on the Bape Sta should be wiped clean and kept away from heat, which can cloud the finish.

Where the record differs

Three details are reported differently. The Bape Sta appears as 2002 in most histories and as 2000 in Sneaker Freaker. Nowhere opened as a shop in 1993, but the company has also been described as founded in 1995, the year a separately incorporated Nowhere opened a store in Harajuku. And the money that opened the first shop is given as two figures roughly ten times apart. In each case both versions are given here rather than one chosen.

Frequently asked questions

When was A Bathing Ape founded?

In 1993, by Nigo, in Ura-Harajuku in Tokyo. Its first pieces were sold at Nowhere, the shop he opened with Jun Takahashi on 1 April that year.

Why is it called A Bathing Ape?

Nigo has said the name comes from the film Planet of the Apes (1968) and from a Japanese phrase about an ape bathing in lukewarm water, an ironic image of a comfortable, complacent generation.

Does Nigo still own BAPE?

No. The Hong Kong group I.T bought a 90.27 percent stake in 2011, and Nigo left the brand when his contract ended on 30 April 2013. He now leads Human Made and is artistic director of Kenzo.

Which BAPE pieces matter most to collectors?

Early 1st Camo pieces, early graphic T-shirts, the Shark hoodie, first-generation Bape Stas and documented collaborations such as those with Kaws are the most studied, provided the label, construction and condition confirm the era.

Can you help me find a particular early piece?

Yes. Our Tokyo team can look for a specific print, camouflage or size through the Hunting Salon™, or you may begin a private request below.

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