London
Buying a tailor-made swimsuit isn’t one thing many would affiliate with Nigo, the Japanese multi-hyphenate designer who famously established the blueprint for contemporary streetwear with his loud, graphic-heavy, scarcity-driven designs. Yet one of many first issues he did on his newest journey to London was go to the town’s notorious tailoring road, Savile Row.
“Recently, my suits have been from Henry Poole, but I’ve been having my suits made for the last 20 years from Huntsman, and from Anderson & Sheppard,” Nigo says, throughout a uncommon interview on the Design Museum the place an exhibition spotlighting his three-decade profession opens Friday.
“I wanted to see what it was like to have something that wasn’t casual,” he provides, after additionally naming the place he will get his sneakers (John Lobb and George Cleverley) and bespoke shirts (Turnbull & Asser). “It used to be that restaurants would have dress codes. Now, everyone’s in jeans. The world has changed. I think it’s boring if you’re always dressed casually. Fashion is to be enjoyed. You need a bit of variety.”
The view aligns with the wider shift in menswear in the direction of extra refined, high quality centered items. It’s additionally indicative of Nigo’s notoriously vast pursuits, which has taken him from the bustle of Tokyo, the place he spent his youth, to the excessive trend runways in Paris, the place he has been the creative director of the French label Kenzo since 2021.
Extraordinarily, the Design Museum present is the primary to be staged on the designer, who can be a DJ, collector and entrepreneur, exterior of his native Japan, regardless of his in depth affect on inventive tastemakers and collaborators, comparable to Pharrell Williams, Ye, Kim Jones, and the late Virgil Abloh, who’ve all continuously credited Nigo for his impression on their work and trend extra extensively. “There wouldn’t be Joopiter if it weren’t for Nigo,” said Williams in 2024, referring to his on-line public sale home promoting uncommon luxurious objects, artwork and memorabilia.
The exhibition options over 700 objects, together with collectibles, conventional craft and classic objects from Nigo’s private archive. It begins with a recreation of his teenage bedroom in Maebashi, Gunma, the place he was born in 1970 as Tomoaki Nagao. He later adopted the title, Nigo, which interprets to “Number Two” in Japanese, as a nod to his mentor — the legendary Japanese designer, musician and DJ, Hiroshi Fujiwara — whom he was as soon as thought of the “second” model of. The exhibition then proceeds chronologically, with sections devoted to key moments from his life.
Asked whether or not he thought twice about something that was included — maybe one thing felt too private, too non-public, or too contradictory? — Nigo pauses earlier than responding: “I wanted to show everything,” and particularly, he says, objects from “1980s Japan, back when we didn’t have the internet.” Among the objects displayed within the bedroom are trend and way of life magazines like Olive, Men’s Club and Popeye, a phrase processor, and a turntable from the last decade. Elsewhere within the exhibition are Nigo’s inventive works, together with his designs for Kenzo and Human Made, and collaborations with massive manufacturers like Louis Vuitton and Uniqlo. One of the centerpieces is an electrical blue ensemble that he designed for his pal, the American rapper Kid Cudi, to put on to the 2022 Met Gala.
An avid collector of every part from furnishings to collectible figurines, Nigo insists that every buy happens from a spot of real curiosity, moderately than a call made primarily based on potential resale worth. Though, he appears to have a knack for investing in issues that can turn into common and, subsequently, worthwhile.
When Nigo was a teen, he would usually hop on a practice to Tokyo to go classic buying. He recollects shopping for his first Levi’s jacket for 38,000 yen (about $200 on the time). When his mother requested how a lot he paid, he couldn’t convey himself to inform her, so he merely mentioned, “3,800 yen,” which nonetheless made her livid. “She said, ‘Why did you pay for this dirty old thing?’ She was the most angry I’ve ever seen in my life. But, nowadays, if you go to a vintage shop in Harajuku, this jacket will be like 3.8 million yen ($23,801),” he chuckles. Today, he’s carrying a duplicate of that jacket (the unique is displayed within the exhibition), styled with matching denim trousers, a black T-shirt, baker boy cap, and limited-edition blue and white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers he designed — 500 pairs of that are being offered on the Design Museum for £134.99 (about $182.21).
“I didn’t buy it with the intention of getting an investment piece, but it just ended that way,” he says, of the jacket — a Nineteen Fifties Type 2 (507XX) trucker model, with a classic wash that offers it an old-school look and really feel. The objects he collects are inclined to encourage his inventive course of, he explains. “I just collect things I love, and the things that I love tend to be certain things. My environment is very important for me when creating, and sometimes I suddenly feel like I need to change it. So, I might sell some stuff, or I might auction it, but I’m basically doing that for fun.”
Nigo’s pure foresight has little question lent itself to the numerous companies he has launched. Most notably, in 1993, he based the pioneering streetwear model A Bathing Ape (BAPE) as a satirical response to the youth tradition in Japan, which he seen as consumerist and complacent (the title is impressed by the Japanese idiom of somebody who stays within the bathtub till the water turns chilly). Through BAPE he launched recognizable, colourful designs just like the shark hoodie, signature camouflage print, and the “Bapesta” sneaker characterised by a star-shaped emblem. Their shortage on the time added to their attraction.
But for Nigo, it was by no means a part of a masterminded technique, and he merely “wanted to wear things that were different to everyone else” in a rustic recognized for social conservatism and conformism. It’s what led to his love for secondhand trend. “If you buy something vintage, that’s the only one,” he says. When it got here to his personal label, Nigo needed to recreate that feeling of desirability, however there have been sensible causes too. “When I started making clothes I didn’t have any money, so I could only make 30 T-shirts at a time. I’d sell them and then make the next lot. They were automatically limited edition.”
Around the identical time, in 1993, Nigo teamed up with Japanese designer Jun Takahashi, founding father of cult clothes label Undercover, to open a boutique referred to as Nowhere in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. Setting up store collectively helped garner protection in Takarajima journal, at a time when native publications didn’t usually promote homegrown trend, thus opening Nigo’s eyes to the ability of collaboration.
In 2003 Nigo partnered with Pharrell Williams to launch the New York-based streetwear model Billionaire Boys Club, which bridged the hole between luxurious trend and hip-hop tradition with its creative, high-end items, worn by the likes of Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg. By 2010, his pursuits began to shift in the direction of extra classic kinds and high-quality manufacturing, as seen within the method to his subsequent clothes label Human Made — which final 12 months launched a historic IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, changing into the primary streetwear model to go public there. In 2010 he additionally based his first restaurant, Curry Up.
He additionally dabbled in adjoining mediums like music: In 2022 he produced a rap compilation album with Pharrell Williams that featured main hip-hop artists, together with A$AP Rocky, Tyler, The Creator, Pusha T, and Lil Uzi Vert, which made him an much more outstanding determine in hip-hop. And since 2025, he has labored as inventive director for the Japanese convenience-store chain FamilyMart, alongside his position at Kenzo, for which he nonetheless reveals his designs at Paris Fashion Week twice yearly.
“When we consider a designer, we often think of someone who draws and makes things by hand, but Nigo is one of those people who samples. He takes things from the past, present and future, and changes it into something new,” says Esme Hawes, who curated the present on the Design Museum. “He’s a creative polymath that is across so many industries. What hasn’t he done?” Additionally, Nigo stays an anomaly in an trade the place many designers on the helm of massive luxurious firms are White males.
Asked if it’s one thing he’s acutely aware of, and why he thinks this can be, Nigo sidesteps the query, as an alternative emphasizing that “there are a lot of Asian designers” in trend, and factors to the trade’s outsized expectations. “Nowadays, it’s not enough just to design clothes. You need to make culture,” he says. “Virgil Abloh was like that, you know, bringing music, fashion and all these things together. Maybe that’s what big companies are looking for now in a creative director.”
Following US occupation after World War II, many Japanese youths grew to become influenced by American tradition and started adopting trend worn by American faculty college students comparable to denim, button-down shirts, chinos, and varsity jackets. Among them was Nigo, who was influenced by the surge of imported American music, trend and popular culture and even started accumulating toy collectible figurines like Donald Duck. He continued to have a deep fascination with Americana and American tradition all through his expansive profession.
Some attentive followers, due to this fact, would possibly query why the exhibition is called “From Japan with Love.” The causes, nonetheless, turn into most obvious because the present involves a detailed with conventional crafts like tea bowls, made by Nigo himself, and calligraphy by the late Japanese artist Yūichi Inoue.
“The last section is more about what I’ve been into for the last 10 years,” explains Nigo. “I’ve always been obsessed with things from the US, and to an extent, London as well. But 10 years ago, I went to see kabuki” — a 400-year-old Japanese efficiency artwork that blends dance, music, and elaborate staging. Its use of colour, costumes and motion was “different from anything I’d seen, and I realized how amazing Japan actually was,” he says, admitting: “Up until that point, I hadn’t really liked Japanese things.”
Ceramics have turn into a specific ardour level for Nigo due to its distinctive and usually serendipitous outcomes. “If you’re making clothes, you can make them exactly as you want. It doesn’t work that way with ceramics. You always need to be experimenting,” he says. “In the exhibition, there are 25 tea bowls, but I actually made about 2,000. Those are the only ones that I was happy with.”
Nigo’s hope is that guests will “enjoy seeing the life of a person who’s just like them” whereas additionally getting “a feel for Japan, and Tokyo back in the day.” But most of all, regardless of having achieved a lot, he continues to have an inherent ability for brand spanking new experiences. “You’ll see that I’m not just interested in fashion. I’m still trying to learn about all the different things.”