With his AW12 HUMAN MADE collection menswear magpie NIGO® continues to breath well-stitched, luxe life into vintage mania.
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The definitive vintage clothes fanatic, NIGO® loves nothing more than borrowing something old and making it into something new. Famed for his insatiable lust over early to mid 20th century menswear, his inscrutable taste for old garms enables him to transcend the trend treadmill and take a birds-eye approach to clothing design. As nostalgia for military uniform reigns supreme, the workwear revival spins speedily on its axis and a fondness for well-worn Levi’s 501s continues to grip men’s fashion, NIGO® has long been the poster boy for it all. But haters of secondhand pungency and frayed hems rest easy, working in collaboration with vintage replica manufacturers WAREHOUSE, through HUMAN MADE NIGO® continues to reinvent the past and offer a boxfresh reinterpretation for the now. Ever a trend trailblazer, through his time at the helm of A Bathing Ape® and his contribution to the success of Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream, he’s established a reputation for always being one hop ahead of the crowd, and whilst HUMAN MADE is all about immortalising the best of what was, it’s also about pioneering a bright and varied fashion future. For AW12, Combining his impeccable eye for form and fabrication with the print-tastic talents of SK8THING, NIGO® bounds into HUMAN MADE’s future with a his best collection to date. With the man himself proving the perfect clotheshorse for his own wares, here we exclusively reveal HUMAN MADE’s AW12 look book and grab a couple of minutes of the busy bossman bee’s time to ask some questions.
How do you take your coffee? Black. I put sugar in bad coffee, though. Can you tell us your deepest vintage-scavenging secret? I don’t really have any. I have been doing it for more than 30 years… Perhaps that’s the secret. How does hunting for vintage in Japan differ from London? I can’t say I’ve ever really done it in London. Not in a serious way. I am mainly looking for US vintage so I find the best selection in the US or Japan. What do you like most about Japan? Pretty much everything is available here and the food is good! What do you like most about London? There are so many things… I am not such a frequent visitor these days so I focus on typically British things like Savile Row. Dawn till dusk, tell us how you like to spend a typical day when you’re visiting London? Sadly I’m not there often enough or long enough to have a typical day. But I tend to try to do the same things when I am in town. I usually have some bespoke suits or shoes in various stages of completion and I usually do a few fittings to keep that process moving forward – since my visits are infrequent and unpredictable I am probably a nightmare customer! I like to get vegetarian take-out from the Grain Store on Portobello Road (is it still there!?), I must have been getting lunch there since some of the first times I visited London. Those kind of things give you a chance to think about everything that’s changed and all the things that haven’t over the years. Since refurbishing the London BAPE store I have been going to BBR across the road from the shop for dinner. Leonid always looks after my guests and me very well. Your archive is on fire and you could only save item what would you grab and why? For a collector, I think there is only one answer to this question: if I can only have one item from the collection then it’s better to let it all burn.
NIGO® wears all clothing Human Made.
Text: Sean Baker
