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-Wired magazine is where I became familiar with the term
"street cred," and no one's got more of it than
Nigo, creator of Bathing Ape urban street wear. He started his business in
1993 when he was 22, with a hole-in-the-wall T-shirt shop in the Harajuku
district of Tokyo, that city's equivalent of the Lower East Side of New
York. In a story by Lola Ogunnaike in yesterday's New York Times, he said,
"when we first got there it was the quietest area of Tokyo, and now it's
one of the coolest areas in Tokyo." It's amazing what street cred can do
for a street. Bathing Ape's just opened a store in Manhattan's SoHo, the
16th outpost in its burgeoning empire which includes stores in Kyoto,
Osaka, and London. The stores are unmarked and intentionally made
difficult to find, and sell clothes produced in carefully limited
quantities to make them more scarce and, subsequently, more desirable.
Nigo also decrees that customers may buy only one piece of any product,
and it must be in their size. He said, "It's to help prevent people from
selling the clothes on the black market. I really don't want a lot of
people wearing my clothes. "His Bape (shorthand for Bathing Ape) shoes
sell for around $300 a pair in Manhattan, though they're going to be
priced at $180 in his new store. Rappers Jay-Z, Cassidy and Pharrell have
been wearing them around town and in their videos, making them all the
more desirable to those whose desires run in this direction. Here's a
link to
the Times story. I was musing about Nigo and fashion and street cred and
what's hot and what's not just now. I mean, when something makes it into
the New York Times, in a sense it's already over. It's a little like the
cover articles for Time, Fortune, and their ilk: when they herald the next
big thing, the only thing you can be absolutely certain about is that the
smart money has already been there and left. The news that something is
news is, actually, old news to those who made the best use of it.
Aristotle Onassis once said, "The secret of success in business is knowing
something no one else knows." True enough; of course, this is precisely
what insider trading is all about. Once everyone knows the secret, it's no
longer a secret nor is it of much value. -blogcritics.org
-On the Second Annual Video Game
Awards Pharrell Williams, a wearing of the Bathing Ape ( BAPE ) Ape Bape
Sta , was wearing an Ice
Cream Shirt and Bape sta shoes, so be on the look out. Pharrel sets the trend and everyone
else follows.
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