Designer, creative director and godfather of streetwear NIGO is getting his first retrospective exhibition, so we went down to the Design Museum to find out all about it. 

London’s Design Museum is hosting the first exhibition on the life and career of the visionary creative director of Kenzo, and founder of A Bathing Ape [BAPE]. “NIGO: From Japan with Love” explores NIGO’s history and multi-faceted brain seen in the multitudes of projects he’s done throughout the years – in fashion, culture, music, sport, art and tea. 

“NIGO’s career is pretty extensive, there was a lot of stuff we couldn’t include,” the exhibition curator Esme Hawes tells us. “Give me 10 galleries, and I could have fit it all in.” The collection features over 700 objects, with 600 being from NIGO’s own personal archive, following his steps from his childhood bedroom and Harajuku to the fashion spaces of Paris. “My personal archive, which has remained mostly private until now, has been the source of my craftsmanship,” NIGO said on the exhibition, which showcases the first vintage piece he ever got, old magazines from his youth, as well as selected BAPE items (like that one camo jacket Biggie wore), a range of pieces from collaborations (from Hello Kitty to Louis Vuitton, Chrome Hearts and Nike), his music projects, his Kenzo designs, and a selection of ceramics hand-thrown by the man himself. The rarest item? The custom Kenzo look that Kid Cudi wore at the 2022 Met Gala – “that was pretty hard to get hold of,” Hawes comments, “lots of favours being pulled, but, luckily, NIGO is super well-connected.”

“What we wanted to do is tell the story of his entire career, but we wanted to start even before his career,” Hawes says. “One of NIGO’s ideas was to begin with a recreation of his teenage bedroom, which you’ll see right at the beginning. That’s where he really started to gain these influences and inspirations that went on to feed the rest of his career. There’s a lot of retro Americana.”

Hawes points to the first item that prompted that fascination with American culture: “It’s a tiny Donald Duck push puppet. You might overlook it, but this is the first object that NIGO collected when he was just six years old. He said that he had 500 yen left, he went into a stationary store, saw one of those lucky bags you used to get, and inside was this Donald Duck push puppet. He said he’d never held anything American before, and, for him, it just sparked this interest.”

She adds: “Nigo grew up in the ‘80s in Maebashi, Japan, which is a town kind of outside of Tokyo. For him, in the ‘80s, there was this hang-up of American military presence from WWII. So you get this kind of cross culture between Japanese culture and Americana. A lot of young people [in Japan] started wearing American clothes, watching American TV, listening to American music, because they saw it as a form of rebellion.”

As one of the “founding fathers of hype culture” (as the Design Museum team has put it), NIGO started out by home-printing T-shirts, and went on to open his first store NOWHERE, which he co-founded with designer Jun Takahashi (UNDERCOVER) in 1993. In the same year, he launched BAPE.  

“If we go back to NIGO’s first brand, A Bathing Ape – that was changed not just the fashion industry, but also the fashion marketing industry. Nowadays, you get a lot of cross-pollination between luxury fashion houses and streetwear culture and things like limited-edition drops, hype culture, celebrity endorsements – BAPE was really the brand that started that off.”

NIGO was the first to break down these barriers between streetwear and music and fashion, and this propelled him to a global audience and introduced him to his long-time friend and collaborator Pharrell (they have founded Billionaire Boys Club, ICECREAM and HUMAN MADE together). He then went on to have a music career with the Teriyaki Boyz (who created the best song of all time: “Tokyo Drift”). And, then, after selling BAPE, he went on to be the first Japanese creative director of Kenzo, since founder Kenzo Takada himself. “He’s just such a huge influence, and also iconic,” Hawes says.

When asked about her favourite item from the collection, Hawes says: “I’m gonna have to go with the lobster bag by Louis Vuitton.” Pharrell, currently creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, brought in his bestie NIGO to collaborate for AW25. “The whole collection really focuses on their friendship. NIGO and Pharrell are really keen fishermen, and they go out fishing together, and that lobster bag is a bit of a hint to the times they’ve spent together.”

And the most surprising? “I didn’t know that he has this newfound passion for Japanese rituals and craft,” Hawes says. “In recent years, he’s turned his hand to train to be a master of tea ceremony. That is a process that can take years and years of dedicated practice. So he’s not there yet, still going. But, he’s creating ceramics, too, and this is a really huge part of his practice and something that NIGO was really keen to include [in the curation].”

The retrospective exhibition also coincides with the drop of the new Nike x NIGO LO2 Air Force 1, the first AF1 that NIGO has put out. This comes decades after NIGO’s famous BAPE STA silhouette, which was modelled after the Air Force, so this is a full-circle moment for the designer and his relationship with Nike. You can cop the Air Force 1 at the Design Museum’s gift shop. 

“NIGO: From Japan with Love” opens May 1st at the Design Museum, you can get your tickets at designmuseum.com.