Word: apes
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When Harvard Law School (HLS) first offered a class entitled “Animal Law” in the spring of 2000, the Harvard Salient predicted catastrophe. “Radical Ape Activists Storm the Law School,” screamed the satirical headline, in a piece that went on to claim, rather more sternly, that the course would lead to lawsuits against Harvard’s own research laboratories for abusing animals...
...this book to read the articles, few of which consist of more than a page of loosely spaced text. It's the photo spreads - especially of the clothes, and especially of famous people wearing the clothes - that will make most readers stop and gawk. In that respect, *A Bathing Ape pays off. Aside from J-Pop starlets and Japanese celebrities like club DJ Cornelius and artist Takashi Murakami, the book's cameos read like an urban teenager's iTunes playlist: N.E.R.D.'s Pharrell Williams, DJ Shadow, M.I.A., T.I., Young Jeezy, Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte, the late Biggie...
...Nigo has managed to diversify his admittedly sparse collection of T's, sneakers and camouflage hoodies. Through some preternaturally savvy marketing, he's made a niche for himself co-branding products with everyone from soft-drink manufacturers to condom makers. He's an equal-opportunity opportunist, too: A BATHING APE logos have graced both Microsoft's X-Box and Nintendo's DS video game handset; his clothes feature characters from both Marvel and D.C. comics...
...BATHING APE's beginnings: "Rewind to the Tokyo of the early 1990s. The asset price bubble that fueled the excesses of the previous decade had just collapsed, and the recession that followed in its wake had an instantaneous and crippling effect on cultural production. In fashion and its allied trades, the contraction in the economy forced an untimely end to the "Designer Boom" that defined the Tokyo high street for much of the 1980s ... [But in Harajuku], a tentative sense of revival was afoot. In its warren of side-streets, ancient storefronts and crumbling housing complexes, a scrappy group...
...Lowdown: Nobody's going to mistake this book for a serious look at the evolution of global fashion or a monograph on the guerilla-retailing model that Nigo and his associates pioneered; its uneven grammar and haphazard use of the serial comma alone should see to that. *A Bathing Ape is an unabashed love letter from Nigo (or Nigo ?, as he's branded in the book) and his co-authors to himself, and as such it plays up A BATHING APE's many successes while leaving any artistic, aesthetic or financial missteps well off the page. Still, what it does...