It’s 10.49am on a Saturday morning, December 2004, in New York City. At 91 Greene Street in SoHo, a large line stretches around the block with hundreds of people waiting. Most of them have camped out overnight. At 11.00am, the security-manned doors open, with only a few people at a time allowed inside. This is the first A Bathing Ape store to open in the US. Thanks to endorsements by the likes of Pharrell Williams, Lil Wayne and Kanye West, streetwear heads from the city, country and beyond are desperate to get their hands on the latest delivery of ape-head logo T-shirts, Bape Sta sneakers and full-zip shark hoodies. Saturday is “new-drop day”, although the brand meets only 10 per cent of the demand; most other days, stock in the store runs low. Hype culture in full effect.

Following its inception in 1993, the brand expanded to 19 outposts in Japan, and locations in Hong Kong and Taipei as well as New York. It collaborated with Pepsi, Supreme and adidas, and created products with UNDERCOVER, Star Wars and Disney. It opened further international outposts, cafes, salons and a record label. Peak BAPE. But behind the scenes, the brand was slowly losing money. In 2011, it was sold to Hong Kong’s I.T Group – 50 million dollars in debt, and having become a symbol of the lazy, hyper-consumptive youth culture its founder sought to critique.

The man behind A Bathing Ape, Tomoaki Nagao, was born in 1970 in Maebashi, Japan to a nurse mother and a metal fabricator father. Spending much of his childhood enthralled by American toys, TV and film, he started collecting items at the age of six – his first piece was a Donald Duck plushie.

At 16, he learnt how to DJ. An interest in fashion started with hip-hop (as a teenager LL Cool J’s gold rope chains and bucket hats were an early inspiration). But it wasn’t until he discovered Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Last Orgy column in Takarajima magazine – a cult publication focused on subcultures – and his predilection for combining pop culture with fashion, that Nagao really found his love for clothing.

In 1988, Nagao swapped Gunma Prefecture for Tokyo, accepting a place at the prestigious Bunka College of Fashion. He would later remark that he learnt “zero” from higher education, and that the best thing about Bunka was meeting fellow student Jun Takahashi of UNDERCOVER. Eschewing formal study for schooling in Tokyo’s nightclubs, he DJed, connected with people and began to make a name for himself and his style.

He would eventually catch the attention of his hero Fujiwara, the “godfather of streetwear”, and take on a job as his personal assistant, helping him to write his Last Orgy column and launch the GOODENOUGH label in 1990. Once, in a club, Nagao was called “Hiroshi Fujiwara nigo” – Hiroshi Fujiwara number two – thanks to his resemblance to his mentor. From that point on, he was NIGO.

NIGO and Jun Takahashi would go on to launch their seminal Harajuku boutique NOWHERE in 1993 (the early home of A Bathing Ape and UNDERCOVER). Along with Shinsuke Takizawa of Neighborhood, they helped birth the Ura-Harajuku movement, an underground subculture that thrived on exclusivity, word-of-mouth, collaborations and self-expression over traditional apprenticeship.

While still at BAPE, NIGO launched two lines of luxury streetwear with Pharrell Williams in 2005 (Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream), as well as Human Made in 2010 – a more refined iteration of its predecessor, focusing on vintage Americana, workwear and depth of design over hype.

Two years after the sale of BAPE, NIGO would go on to serve as the creative director for Uniqlo’s T-shirt line. In 2021, he was appointed artistic director of KENZO, marking a full transition into high fashion. (In 2020, he collaborated with Virgil Abloh on a capsule collection for Louis Vuitton. A second capsule would follow in 2022, as well as a reunion with Williams for Louis Vuitton’s AW25 collection.) His work at KENZO carries all his signature hallmarks – playful graphics, cultural references – while honouring the house’s legacy. And in 2025, he was announced as creative director of Japanese convenience store FamilyMart.

“NIGO’s global status is testament to his strength as a collaborator and his ability to work across various creative practices,” says Esme Hawes, curator of the Design Museum’s new – and first of its kind – NIGO retrospective. “The ways in which he has bridged the gap between different creative practices is what makes him so appealing.”

As well as representing NIGO’s entire career, Hawes was particularly interested in exploring his role as a creative director. “The role of the designer in the traditional sense has changed significantly over the past few decades,” she says. “Instead, individuals who work across multiple fields and are master collaborators are becoming more and more successful. This has had a knock-on effect on trends and shifts within retailing, marketing, luxury and popular culture at large.”

Today, you can see NIGO’s fingerprints everywhere: in the drop culture of sneaker releases, in the fusion of streetwear and luxury and high and low culture, in the idea that a brand can be both niche and globally influential. And while logomania has receded and collaborations have reached saturation point, he continues to stay true to his instincts and his vision – both of which are guided less by market demand and more by that deep love of pop culture, a reverence for the past, and a passion for collecting.

Remember the Donald Duck plushie? That humble possession was the first in what is now an archive of more than 10,000 pieces spanning 20th-century Americana and clothing, pop-culture memorabilia, toys, fine art, Apple computers, rare designer furniture, trunks, cars and Japanese ceramics. First and foremost, he is a fan.

“As soon as I met NIGO, I knew I wanted to be family,” Williams said during a 2012 discussion for his book Places And Spaces I’ve Been. “I recognised what he was doing as something I have felt my whole life… I learnt about a lot of new things that are important to who I am today. I met someone who believed in me and introduced me to new art, design, fashion, food… NIGO made my dreams reality.”