A BATHING APE® IS AMBUSH®ED!!! | Hypebeast

A BATHING APE®: The Present

Does the direction of A BATHING APE® now represent 100% your interests? Is that why we see such a diverse variety of style from sneakers and boots, to more refined pieces?

NIGO®: My original goal for A BATHING APE® was and still is to design clothes that I want to wear. This hasn’t changed over the life of the brand. But of course, over time and given the expansive reach of the company, we’ve inevitably reached a scale where it isn’t possible anymore to center all the creativity around my own desires. This year I also started a new company in order to work on different creative projects. This helped sort of distance myself from all my previous contributions to A BATHING APE®. However, now I truly understand how much I am correlated to A BATHING APE®.

This year, A BATHING APE® has open the door to many collaborative collections such as URSUS this latest capsule with AMBUSH®. How important is it for you to work with talented designers with different backgrounds including TET and VERBAL?

NIGO®: The brand has been running a long time and I believe it’s important from time to time to bring fresh influences and challenge myself with an outside perspective. In addition, the people I usually bring on board are close friends with whom I have developed a strong creative connection with. The URSUS capsule and the AMBUSH® capsule are the results of long-standing friendships and mutual respect between myself TET and VERBAL.

Was it hard to incorporate an outlet style “The Pirate Store” into A BATHING APE’s current retail framework? How does this affect A BATHING APE® as a brand?

NIGO®: Up until now, leftover pieces from each season were destroyed but this year, along with our new manager we decided to go into another direction and try to incorporate a parallel retail experience. We felt that we could do it in a way that fit the new scale that BAPE® has reached over the past few years and also work well given the current economical situation. We secured a couple of interesting locations to develop this concept into a Pirate’s stolen treasure that would offer our product to a different audience.

Do you feel that A BATHING APE® has reached a scale where it is now considered as an international brand more than a Japanese “Harajuku” brand?

NIGO®: Absolutely, I think we reached that scale in terms of image and activity a few years ago which now finds us sharing a common platform with fellow Japanese brands with a global reach such as UNDERCOVER and COMME des GARÇONS. In addition, the whole Harajuku movement has really ceased to exist as a cohesive group of brands with common influences and a lot of brands that were founded at around the same time as BAPE® aren’t active anymore. Since A BATHING APE’s foundation 16 years ago, Junio (UNDERCOVER founder) and I were aiming to grow our brands into businesses and that wasn’t particularly the case for other brands at that time.