Lot 22 email save

Nigo - A Bathing Ape Stratocaster® in BAPE camo

Nigo – A Bathing ApeFender® Stratocaster® with camouflage print. Japan's hottest fashion designer and an internationally famous arbiter of style, Nigo's contribution to the RockCouture™ Collection employs his signature camouflage pattern.As a fashion student, magazine stylist and DJ in 1990s Tokyo, Nigo could never find exactly the quality-crafted, cooler-than-thou T shirts he and his buddies craved. So he started making them himself, selling them to friends and out of duffel bags at parties and DJ shows. The shirts were strange but playful, aggressively designed affairs, frequently sporting simian motifs and obscure echoes of the 1968 sci-fi classic movie Planet of the Apes. Produced in limited quantities, they quickly became the ultimate badge of street cred among the hipsters in the back alleys of Tokyo's fashion-obsessed Harajuku neighbourhood. Since then, Nigo has carefully nurtured his label, A Bathing Ape, into a cultural phenomenon by striking a fine balance between exclusivity and mass appeal. His grow-slow approach has enabled him to retain 100% ownership and total artistic control of the company, which now has interests in not just clothing and accessories but also music, art, cafés and hairstyling. Although his signature ape heads and camouflage patterns have appeared on everything from action figures and trucker hats to condoms and Pepsi bottles, the core fashion lines still come in tightly controlled production runs and are sold almost exclusively in Bathing Ape's own hard-to-find, frequently unmarked stores. When devotees do locate a shop, they are often greeted by lines around the block just to get in and subjected to limits on the number of pieces they can buy. © Jim Frederick for Time Asia "I love guitars and I collect them – the Stratocaster® makes me think of Buddy Holly and George Harrison. Through A Bathing Ape I have made my own versions of most of the things that interest me… but I have never made a guitar – this is the first and only one" To Benefit: Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres