tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24504057.post-1143595833462573042006-03-28T17:28:00.000-08:002006-03-28T20:12:37.523-08:00Wired 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.globekicks.com/bape.html">GlobeKicks.com - Shop for Ape Bape Sta shoes</a><div class="blogger-post-footer">James Brown http://www.globekicks.com http://sneakernews.blogspot.com</div>Administratornoreply@blogger.com