London Design Museum to host A Bathing Ape's NIGO retrospective

Streetwear royalty is getting the museum treatment. From the 1st of May 2026, London’s Design Museum will host the first-ever retrospective dedicated to NIGO, the designer widely credited with dragging streetwear out of Harajuku side streets and into the global luxury spotlight.

If you’ve ever clocked BAPE camo, Billionaire Boys Club graphics or the quietly obsessive detailing behind HUMAN MADE, you’ve seen NIGO’s fingerprints. Across a 30-year career, he’s become one of the architects of modern hype culture, blending vintage Americana, hip-hop, Japanese craft and fashion history into a blueprint brands still nick from today.

The exhibition is a proper deep dive, too. More than 700 objects will be on display, including 600 items pulled directly from NIGO’s personal archive, many of which have never been publicly shown before. It tracks his rise from Tokyo’s Ura-Harajuku scene in the early ’90s to his current role as Artistic Director at KENZO, the first Japanese designer to hold the post since founder Kenzo Takada.

Visitors will move through four themed sections, starting with a recreation of NIGO’s teenage bedroom. It sounds niche, but it’s actually key to understanding his entire design language. Expect shelves packed with vintage Levi’s, baseball caps, American pop culture memorabilia, Japanese toys, magazines and music, all the cross-cultural references that shaped the streetwear playbook before it was even a thing.

From there, the show moves into the birth of A Bathing Ape, featuring early BAPE grails, original sketches and the marketing tricks that helped define modern drop culture. Spray-can T-shirt packaging, membership cards styled like credit cards, and early collaborations with names like KAWS, Disney and Nintendo have all been teased.

Later sections explore his wider cultural influence, including work with Pharrell Williams, Louis Vuitton and Nike, alongside pieces from his KENZO tenure and outfits like Kid Cudi’s Met Gala look. The final chapter focuses on NIGO’s growing interest in traditional Japanese craft, including ceramics he’s hand-thrown himself and a life-size glass tea house built specifically for the exhibition.

It’s shaping up to be less of a fashion exhibition and more of a cultural timeline, charting how streetwear went from underground obsession to global industry, with NIGO sat right at the centre of it.

The NIGO retrospective opens at the Design Museum on 1 May 2026. Tickets are on sale now from £16, whilst members go free.

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