A Bathing Ape 28th Anniversary: we celebrate the legendary brand with some special features.
“The Monkey thinks, the Monkey does” it is the case to say, when it comes to A Bathing Ape.
In 28 years, the mythical BAPE monkey – born in Shibuya in 1993 by the creative genius Nigo – has thought and done so many things that three editorials would not be enough to recount them all.
Instead, we prefer to focus on a few tidbits – that you may not yet know – about the lifestyle brand and the creative genius behind it, which gave birth to authentic Japanese streetwear.
1) BAPE was a Pioneer of Streetwear.
BAPE‘s roots go back to Ura-Harajuku in the early 90s, which together with Undercover, Fragment, Neighborhood, Hysteric Glamour and Sk8thing contributed to the birth of the Japanese Streetwear scene.
After a few years as a stylist for Popeye, Nigo opened his own shop “Nowhere” with Jun Takahashi: in one of the shop’s rooms, he made graphic prints on T-Shirts.
The mythical logo draws inspiration from the American cult film ‘Planet of the Apes’ from 1968, but combined with Japanese culture with the idiom ‘A Bathing Ape’ or ‘A monkey bathing in lukewarm water’.
The expression is used to describe someone who lies in a situation for a long time, out of inertia, until the water becomes completely cold.
A sarcastic reference to the same hyper-consumerist youth that would later form the hard core of his brand, almost as an irony of fate.