Tomoaki Nagao, known professionally as Nigo, trained at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo from 1989 to 1991, studying fashion editing and styling alongside internships at Popeye and freelance illustration work.

The defining apprenticeship came through Hiroshi Fujiwara, the godfather of Japanese street culture. His orbit gave Nigo his professional name (number two in Japanese) and his approach to retail, scarcity, and the graphic possibilities of the T-shirt.

The method has stayed consistent since. American pop culture and hip-hop iconography filtered through Japanese production discipline, expressed through a tight set of graphic motifs, camouflage variants, and limited drops.

In 1993, Nigo co-founded NOWHERE in Ura-Harajuku with Jun Takahashi and started A Bathing Ape (BAPE) from its back room, a scarcity-driven streetwear house wrapped around a Planet of the Apes reference.

The Ape Head logo arrived first on heavyweight T-shirts and hoodies. The 1st Camo print followed in 1996 across full-zip pullovers, and the BAPESTA sneaker in 2002 and Shark Full-Zip Hoodie in 2004 extended the vocabulary into the brand’s mid-2000s peak.

Pharrell Williams and Kanye West wore the clothes through that decade, pulling BAPE into hip-hop’s center and producing the modern hypebeast model of limited drops and a resale market only Stüssy and Supreme had previewed.

Nigo sold a 90 percent stake in BAPE to Hong Kong’s I.T Group in 2011 for roughly $2.8 million, a year after founding Human Made around vintage Americana, workwear construction, and a teddy bear emblem.

LVMH named Nigo artistic director of Kenzo in September 2021, succeeding Felipe Oliveira Baptista and becoming the first Japanese designer to lead the house since founder Kenzo Takada stepped away in 1999.

His fall-winter 2022 debut at the Palais Royal reframed the house through tiger-stripe knitwear, varsity jackets, Japanese denim, and tailored workwear, pulling Takada’s bohemian heritage into street-tuned ready-to-wear.

The 40th Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix followed in 2022 and Human Made went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in November 2025, twin markers of a career that turned a Japanese street vocabulary into luxury format, the graphic motif and the limited drop now standard across the industry.