Legendary Japanese designer Nigo takes us inside his vast collection and teenage bedroom

By Kati Chitrakorn, CNN

London (CNN) — Buying a tailored suit is not something many would associate with Nigo, the Japanese multi-hyphenate designer who famously established the blueprint for modern streetwear with his loud, graphic-heavy, scarcity-driven designs. Yet one of the first things he did on his latest trip to London was visit the city’s infamous tailoring street, Savile Row.

“Recently, my suits have been from Henry Poole, but I’ve been having my suits made for the last 20 years from Huntsman, and from Anderson & Sheppard,” Nigo says, during a rare interview at the Design Museum where an exhibition spotlighting his three-decade career opens Friday.

“I wanted to see what it was like to have something that wasn’t casual,” he adds, after also naming where he gets his shoes (John Lobb and George Cleverley) and bespoke shirts (Turnbull & Asser). “It used to be that restaurants would have dress codes. Now, everyone’s in jeans. The world has changed. I think it’s boring if you’re always dressed casually. Fashion is to be enjoyed. You need a bit of variety.”

The view aligns with the wider shift in menswear towards more refined, quality focused pieces. It’s also indicative of Nigo’s notoriously vast interests, which has taken him from the bustle of Tokyo, where he spent his formative years, to the high fashion runways in Paris, where he has been the artistic director of the French label Kenzo since 2021.

Extraordinarily, the Design Museum show is the first to be staged on the designer, who is also a DJ, collector and entrepreneur, outside of his native Japan, despite his extensive influence on creative tastemakers and collaborators, such as Pharrell Williams, Ye, Kim Jones, and the late Virgil Abloh, who have all frequently credited Nigo for his impact on their work and fashion more widely. “There wouldn’t be Joopiter if it weren’t for Nigo,” said Williams in 2024, referring to his online auction house selling rare luxury items, art and memorabilia.

The exhibition features over 700 objects, including collectibles, traditional craft and vintage objects from Nigo’s personal archive. It begins with a recreation of his teenage bedroom in Maebashi, Gunma, where he was born in 1970 as Tomoaki Nagao. He later adopted the name, Nigo, which translates to “Number Two” in Japanese, as a nod to his mentor — the legendary Japanese designer, musician and DJ, Hiroshi Fujiwara — whom he was once considered the “second” version of. The exhibition then proceeds chronologically, with sections dedicated to key moments from his life.

Asked whether he thought twice about anything that was included — perhaps something felt too personal, too private, or too contradictory? — Nigo pauses before responding: “I wanted to show everything,” and specifically, he says, items from “1980s Japan, back when we didn’t have the internet.” Among the items displayed in the bedroom are fashion and lifestyle magazines like Olive, Men’s Club and Popeye, a word processor, and a turntable from the decade. Elsewhere in the exhibition are Nigo’s creative works, including his designs for Kenzo and Human Made, and collaborations with big brands like Louis Vuitton and Uniqlo. One of the centerpieces is an electric blue ensemble that he designed for his friend, the American rapper Kid Cudi, to wear to the 2022 Met Gala.

A natural-born tastemaker

An avid collector of everything from furniture to figurines, Nigo insists that each purchase occurs from a place of genuine interest, rather than a decision made based on potential resale value. Though, he seems to have a knack for investing in things that will become popular and, subsequently, valuable.

When Nigo was a teenager, he would often hop on a train to Tokyo to go vintage shopping. He recalls buying his first Levi’s jacket for 38,000 yen (about $200 at the time). When his mom asked how much he paid, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her, so he simply said, “3,800 yen,” which still made her furious. “She said, ‘Why did you pay for this dirty old thing?’ She was the most angry I’ve ever seen in my life. But, nowadays, if you go to a vintage shop in Harajuku, this jacket will be like 3.8 million yen ($23,801),” he chuckles. Today, he’s wearing a replica of that jacket (the original is displayed in the exhibition), styled with matching denim trousers, a black T-shirt, baker boy cap, and limited-edition blue and white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers he designed — 500 pairs of which are being sold at the Design Museum for £134.99 (about $182.21).

“I didn’t buy it with the intention of getting an investment piece, but it just ended that way,” he says, of the jacket — a 1950s Type 2 (507XX) trucker style, with a vintage wash that gives it an old-school look and feel. The objects he collects tend to inspire his creative process, he explains. “I just collect things I love, and the things that I love tend to be certain things. My environment is very important for me when creating, and sometimes I suddenly feel like I need to change it. So, I might sell some stuff, or I might auction it, but I’m basically doing that for fun.”

Nigo’s natural foresight has no doubt lent itself to the many businesses he has launched. Most notably, in 1993, he founded the pioneering streetwear brand A Bathing Ape (BAPE) as a satirical response to the youth culture in Japan, which he viewed as consumerist and complacent (the name is inspired by the Japanese idiom of someone who stays in the bath until the water turns cold). Through BAPE he introduced recognizable, colorful designs like the shark hoodie, signature camouflage print, and the “Bapesta” sneaker characterized by a star-shaped logo. Their scarcity at the time added to their appeal.

But for Nigo, it was never part of a masterminded strategy, and he simply “wanted to wear things that were different to everyone else” in a country known for social conservatism and conformism. It’s what led to his love for secondhand fashion. “If you buy something vintage, that’s the only one,” he says. When it came to his own label, Nigo wanted to recreate that feeling of desirability, but there were practical reasons too. “When I started making clothes I didn’t have any money, so I could only make 30 T-shirts at a time. I’d sell them and then make the next lot. They were automatically limited edition.”

‘What hasn’t he done?’

Around the same time, in 1993, Nigo teamed up with Japanese designer Jun Takahashi, founder of cult clothing label Undercover, to open a boutique called Nowhere in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. Setting up shop together helped garner coverage in Takarajima magazine, at a time when local publications didn’t often promote homegrown fashion, thus opening Nigo’s eyes to the power of collaboration.

In 2003 Nigo partnered with Pharrell Williams to launch the New York-based streetwear brand Billionaire Boys Club, which bridged the gap between luxury fashion and hip-hop culture with its artistic, high-end pieces, worn by the likes of Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg. By 2010, his interests started to shift towards more vintage styles and high-quality manufacturing, as seen in the approach to his next clothing label Human Made — which last year launched a historic IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, becoming the first streetwear brand to go public there. In 2010 he also founded his first restaurant, Curry Up.

He also dabbled in adjacent mediums like music: In 2022 he produced a rap compilation album with Pharrell Williams that featured major hip-hop artists, including A$AP Rocky, Tyler, The Creator, Pusha T, and Lil Uzi Vert, which made him an even more prominent figure in hip-hop. And since 2025, he has worked as creative director for the Japanese convenience-store chain FamilyMart, alongside his role at Kenzo, for which he still shows his designs at Paris Fashion Week twice yearly.

“When we consider a designer, we often think of someone who draws and makes things by hand, but Nigo is one of those people who samples. He takes things from the past, present and future, and changes it into something new,” says Esme Hawes, who curated the show at the Design Museum. “He’s a creative polymath that is across so many industries. What hasn’t he done?” Additionally, Nigo remains an anomaly in an industry where many designers at the helm of big luxury companies are White men.

Asked if it’s something he’s conscious of, and why he thinks this may be, Nigo sidesteps the question, instead emphasizing that “there are a lot of Asian designers” in fashion, and points to the industry’s outsized expectations. “Nowadays, it’s not enough just to design clothes. You need to make culture,” he says. “Virgil Abloh was like that, you know, bringing music, fashion and all these things together. Maybe that’s what big companies are looking for now in a creative director.”

Returning to his roots

Following US occupation after World War II, many Japanese youths became influenced by American culture and began adopting fashion worn by American college students such as denim, button-down shirts, chinos, and varsity jackets. Among them was Nigo, who was influenced by the surge of imported American music, fashion and pop culture and even began collecting toy figurines like Donald Duck. He continued to have a deep fascination with Americana and American culture throughout his expansive career.

Some attentive fans, therefore, might question why the exhibition is named “From Japan with Love.” The reasons, however, become most apparent as the show comes to a close with traditional crafts like tea bowls, made by Nigo himself, and calligraphy by the late Japanese artist Yūichi Inoue.

“The last section is more about what I’ve been into for the last 10 years,” explains Nigo. “I’ve always been obsessed with things from the US, and to an extent, London as well. But 10 years ago, I went to see kabuki” — a 400-year-old Japanese performance art that blends dance, music, and elaborate staging. Its use of color, costumes and movement was “different from anything I’d seen, and I realized how amazing Japan actually was,” he says, admitting: “Up until that point, I hadn’t really liked Japanese things.”

Ceramics have become a particular passion point for Nigo because of its unique and often serendipitous outcomes. “If you’re making clothes, you can make them exactly as you want. It doesn’t work that way with ceramics. You always need to be experimenting,” he says. “In the exhibition, there are 25 tea bowls, but I actually made about 2,000. Those are the only ones that I was happy with.”

Nigo’s hope is that visitors will “enjoy seeing the life of a person who’s just like them” while also getting “a feel for Japan, and Tokyo back in the day.” But most of all, despite having achieved so much, he continues to have an aptitude for new experiences. “You’ll see that I’m not just interested in fashion. I’m still trying to learn about all the different things.”

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