Word: aping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bathing Ape By Nigo with Akio Iida and Ian Luna Rizzoli, 368 pages...
...camouflage jacket on the back of your favorite hip-hop star, or the neon-colored sneakers on the feet of the latest pop dance sensation. Chances are you'll see the silhouette of a heavy-browed gorilla, the logo of the graphic designer's company, A BATHING APE - a streetwear icon that grew out of a hole-in-the-wall Harajuku storefront to become a Japanese Gen-Y obsession, an Asian fashion fetish and eventually a global phenomenon. Sold only in limited quantities and only through his A BATHING APE boutiques in Japan, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York...
...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...