There was a moment, about six years ago, when Nigo realized he felt old.
This is not a particularly unusual feeling for someone in his mid-40s, as he was then. But this was Nigo, one of the most influential figures in streetwear, who helped turn a subculture into culture-culture, who practically pioneered the concept of selling $400 hoodies to lines of hungry, hungry hypebeasts.
Nigo had been tapping into youth culture since 1993, when he founded A Bathing Ape (or Bape). Often seen wearing Bape’s signature camouflage pattern, along with diamond-encrusted necklaces, the mononymous designer and music producer had become a cool guys’ cool guy, a hero-collaborator to men such as Pharrell Williams, Kanye West and Virgil Abloh.
But as he approached middle age, Nigo found himself dressing more conservatively, he said. After 20 years with Bape, he had sold and left the brand, focusing instead on his other labels (such as Human Made, founded in 2010) and other roles (such as creative director of the Uniqlo UT collection, appointed in 2014). He began to think, “Maybe it’s not my time anymore,” as he recalled in an interview, speaking through a Japanese translator.
Then Williams intervened.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing?’” said Williams, a longtime friend and business partner through their Billionaire Boys Club label. “Now is not the time for that. Now is the time for you to really hunker down, put your head down low and do what you do best. You are one of the greatest curators of taste and purveyors of what’s next.”
(“Everything was just changing really rapidly,” Williams said of Nigo’s quasi-midlife crisis. “And Nigo’s a Capricorn. Capricorn’s an earth sign, so they’re into certainty.”)
Nigo took the advice seriously, realizing it was part of his job, he said, to not “succumb to those kinds of tendencies” of feeling old or out of touch.
Now, a few years removed from his intervention, Williams sees this moment in Nigo’s life as necessary, “so that he could make room for this” — this being Nigo’s newest role as artistic director of Kenzo. On Sunday in Paris, the 51-year-old designer will present his first collection for the brand, which is owned by LVMH.
When the announcement of Nigo’s appointment was made in September, it emphasized that he was the first Japanese designer of the house since Kenzo Takada, its founder. Takada left the brand in 1999, a few years after selling to LVMH for about $80 million. He died in 2020 at age 81 of complications from COVID-19.
Nigo never met Takada, he said, although Takada had occasionally visited the campus of Nigo’s alma mater, Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, while Nigo was a student. Still, Kenzo’s early work was a big influence on Nigo as a teenager.
The brand “had a particularly interesting way of using powerful colors together,” Nigo said, which differed from the dark, somber, cool use of color dominating Japanese fashion at the time. Takada’s collections highlighted Asian textiles but also borrowed elements from European folk dress, theater costumes, military uniforms and more.
This absorption of eclectic influences is something Nigo sees reflected in his own work. He has long been inspired by (and has inspired) hip-hop culture. His work incorporates military themes, cartoonish animal illustrations and vintage American workwear silhouettes. Yet his first Kenzo collection will be largely an homage to Takada’s early work, particularly his designs from the 1980s.
Those early collections included accents such as kimono sleeves and oversize berets; the new Kenzo kimonos are imagined as overcoats, and its large berets are embroidered with the year “1970.” (That’s the year Nigo was born, but also the year Takada presented his first fashion show at Galerie Vivienne, which is the site of Nigo’s
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