Nigo After Bape, Human Made, Pharrell and the Kenzo Years

Galerie Vivienne is a covered arcade in Paris with a glass roof and a mosaic floor, and in 1970 Kenzo Takada opened his first store and staged his first show there. In January 2022 Nigo brought his own first Kenzo collection back to the same passage. He was born in 1970, the year the house began, and nearly every look on that runway came with a hat, berets included.

It was a strange, neat homecoming for a man most people still file under one word. The ape.

Leaving the ape behind

The Bape story is told elsewhere on this site, from the 1993 opening of Nowhere in our Ura-Harajuku guide to the hip-hop years in how hip-hop rewrote menswear. The short version of the ending is that Nigo sold a majority of A Bathing Ape to Hong Kong's I.T Group in 2011 and left the brand in 2013.

By then he had already started over. Nigo founded Human Made in 2010, a year before the Bape sale, and he is still its creative director. Where Bape was loud, the new label played smaller, and its collaborations show a dry sense of humor. In 2025 it teamed up with the oat milk brand Minor Figures, and FashionUnited reported that it was the first brand collaboration Minor Figures had ever done. It is a small, slightly odd project, and that is the point.

Twenty years with Pharrell

No partnership defines Nigo's career like the one with Pharrell Williams. In 2003 the two launched Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream. A year later, according to LVMH, they worked together for Louis Vuitton for the first time, on the Millionaires sunglasses.

The Louis Vuitton thread kept running. In 2020 Nigo teamed up with Virgil Abloh on LV², a capsule collection for Louis Vuitton. In March 2022 he released I Know Nigo, his return to music after about two decades, with Pharrell, Pusha T, Kid Cudi, A$AP Rocky, Tyler, the Creator and Lil Uzi Vert among the features.

Then the friendship went onto the runway. In January 2025, at the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, Pharrell and Nigo presented Remember the Future, the Louis Vuitton Men's Fall-Winter 2025 collection, as co-designers. LVMH's account of the show lists sashiko stitching on denim, shippō weaving, kintsugi-style gilding on a Speedy and a cherry blossom motif. It is the clearest picture yet of what the two have been trading back and forth since 2003, and it sits right beside our coverage of Pharrell's Louis Vuitton menswear.

A Paris house

LVMH announced on September 15, 2021, that Nigo would become artistic director of Kenzo, succeeding Felipe Oliveira Baptista. He started on September 20. The fit was almost too tidy. He and Takada attended the same Tokyo fashion school, and he was the first Japanese designer to lead the house since Takada left in 1999.

The debut collection, shown during Paris men's week in January 2022, mixed varsity jackets and Harris Tweed overcoats with pinstriped suits worn over flat, kimono-style wool jackets, and brought back the red poppy, one of the house's oldest motifs. Pharrell, Kanye West and Tyler, the Creator were among the guests on the wooden chairs lining the arcade. It read as Ivy League dressing filtered through Tokyo, which is more or less what Nigo has always made.

He has kept the founder close. In January 2026 Kenzo showed its Autumn-Winter 2026 collection at 8 Rue Sedaine, the former Paris home where Takada lived until 2009. In between, Nigo took on another job, as creative director of the Japanese convenience chain FamilyMart, announced in February 2025 while he stayed at Kenzo.

Human Made goes public

On November 27, 2025, Human Made Inc. listed on the Growth market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, as the company confirmed in its own listing announcement. The Japan Times, citing Bloomberg, reported that the shares were priced at ¥3,130, the top of the marketed range, raising about ¥17.8 billion (around $115 million) and valuing the company at ¥71.7 billion. According to that report, Nigo and Pharrell were both among the existing shareholders selling shares in the offering. Proceeds from new shares were earmarked for new stores in Japan and for e-commerce.

Demand was heavy. HIGHXTAR reported that the stock closed its first day up 13 percent after trading as much as 26 percent higher during the session. Citing Asian media, the same report said the company's plans for the next two years include new flagships in Tokyo and Osaka and a bigger push into the United States.

That makes Nigo an unusual figure. He founded one of the most famous streetwear brands in history, gave it up, built a second one from scratch, took it public and ran a French luxury house at the same time. In 2026 the Design Museum in London gave him his first UK exhibition, Nigo: From Japan with Love, which ran from May 1 to October 4.

For more on the Tokyo scene and the people it produced, see our Japan and streetwear hubs and the full culture section.

Back in Galerie Vivienne, under the glass roof where Kenzo began, a man born in the house's first year sent his own Kenzo down the runway.