I originally intended this to be a video blog about BAPE, but I think it might be better to put the text here first and do a video component later. Why video blog, because this is a lot of content well suited for that medium.
Destruction is necessary for progress. Today I want to explore BAPE also known as a Bathing Ape. Founded by NIGO in 1993 BAPE is a postmodern Japanese fashion brand. BAPE is the birth of the Japanese commodification process , street culture meeting high culture, and database consumerism. I will explain database consumerism in another video+post. I like NIGO a lot because he is a playful and honest marketing master with taste.
Nigo infront of KAWS' art, which Nigo commissioned.
A Brief History of BAPE
A universe built on destruction.
New discoveries are rooted in economics, disease, and genius. I think the BAPE story is somewhere between genius and economics. Economically the Japanese asset price bubble was happening in the late 80′s. Many estates were overvalued and the bubble popped in 1991. During the recession a space for cultural experimentation began to emerge in Harajuku. In the 1990′s Japan had a particular take on fashion. Fashion magazines were extremely popular, the Tokyo club structure had revived [meaning the young bought clothes, to be seen by others, and Japanese youth wouldn't mind spending $200 on a pair of shoes]. Harajuku began to feel like Paris, everybody who was somebody went to Harajuku to shop, to talk, to see what was up, and to see what was the next cool thing.
Enter NIGO
Before BAPE, NIGO would travel to America to get vintage goods [jeans, magazines, and American culture]. One of the Japanese looks back then was called Amekaji look, it was basically the way Japanese teenagers interpreted American style and dressed this way in Japan. Earlier I wrote on database consumerism, for me it is here where Nigo is building his sartorial database. In his trips to America listening to the music, eating at the waffle house, walking around the streets. I wish I could find more documentation about his experiences in America. In terms of American culture NIGO is a collector of Planet of the Apes memorabilia and it it is rumored this is why he chose to call his company A Bathing Ape. This begins to make sense if one keeps the database mindset (which I will later expound upon in another post).
Throughout his BAPE career NIGO charted new retailing concepts in the realm of street wear, the idea of the limited edition [Walter Benjamin would love this]. NIGO remains true to the streets by keeping an anti-populist outlook on things. He places value on the rationing and limitation of products and begins to redefine street wear, and what it means to be unique. NIGO is one of the first marketing geniuses who gets it (think SupremexLou Reed , fusing high culture with street culture) One tenet of NIGO’s marketing stratagem is collaboration with American icons.
Retail Experience
If you think the Apple store is revolutionary read about Masamichi Katayama of Wonderwall. His interior design’s were and still are way ahead of their time. Katayama is very special to me because he takes what could be an average in store experience and makes it become something luxurious and special, an experience… a memory. He and NIGO meet and click and together they create the instore BAPE experience. One tenet is that of scarcity and serenity, for example instead of having to choose from 3000 of the same t shirt of 3 different sizes, they only put one shirt out on the rack. This saves spaces and reduces clutter.
A recent NYTimes article on Katayama: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/fashion/18wonderwall.html
You have probably been in one of Katayama’s interior designs. In 2006 he designed the interior of Uniqlo in SOHO. I’ve been there a few times and its a fun place. Katayama wants “to create a town within a building” precise, fastidious, well proportioned, mania for reflective surfaces and misdirection. NIGO & Katayama share the same vision for things. I really think NIGO’s success and Katayama’s success and influences on the retail world are interconnected. Unlike the tradition retail experience, NIGO would only put out a few shirts and allow the store to have more space than traditional stores. Because of the Limited Edition mind set, goods would sell out and store would become a hang out space, networking space, and etc. Katayama took this idea further by building restaurants inside of stores (all pre Barnes and Noble cafe). The idea of a store having a hang out seems normal now… think Starbucks, Bookstore or any experience like that. Katayama also designed the colette store in Paris france, and took his “town within a building” way of design colette has a water bar. BAPE stores are beautiful and playful.
Competition x Collaboration
The reason I like BAPE so much is because NIGO had many ideas on consumerism and leadership. In Harajuku it was easy to take trips to each others creative offices leading to free flowing creative sessions. Imagine Steve Jobs & Bill Gates back in the day stealing each others ideas and what not. Sure it was bad but at the end of the day, all of society benefited! NIGO even had a recording studio in his offices. Talk about cool! The internet was booming… global village Marhsall McLuhan had predicted was happening and NIGO was their to capitalize on this experience as his business became more and more globalized, so did his collaborations. NIGO often could allow companies to tap into the Japanese market.
- Disney
- Pepsi 2001
- Kanye West
- Nintendo
- Marvel
- Murakami
- KAWS, Stash, Futura
- DC comics/Marvel
- BAPE’s eames chair
NIGOVISION, the japanification of hip hop visual culture, brand building with NIGO
NIGO had a recording studio in his company called APESOUNDS. APESOUNDS is cool because it collaborated with artists from overseas. Pharrell Williams led to other partnerships such as the Billionaire Boys Club and Ice cream. NIGO has a song in Tokyo Drift with his band Teriyaki Boyz (kind of silly naming, but you get it… and he’s in a movie for crying out loud!) He also collaborates with Kanye West in 2008.
NIGO marketed to everybody and built what I call the BAPEverse! — the collectable everything
- BAPEcafe, [Sarah Lerfel look at colette.fr's water bar]
- BAPEkids
- BAPEcuts
- BAPEgallery…
- BAPE STAs footwear (hugely successful, fun, cool designs)
Destruction+Future
In February 2011 the Chinese I.T group bought 90% of NOWHERE Inc. [BAPE'S parent company] for $2.8 million dollars, a true postmodern spectacle. Now the Chinese own a huge stake of what could be considered a true Japanese product, a piece of Japanese history. This is the stuff Arjun Appadurai speaks of in his fivescapes (where you have oriental culture consuming occidental culture as if they created it and vice versa). Today NIGO is 41 and will be the creative director for BAPE for the next two years. I am curious to see where BAPE goes and where NIGO will be. 41 is still very young.
So why is destruction necessary for progress? I think that if the Japanese bubble didn’t burst we might not have had the same ambitious BAPE.
That’s all for now, been wanting to get this off of my chest since January!
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/oxz38/gaming_vs_disability_an_immediate_and_awesome/
This post touched me because it shows the ethics of designing for everyone.
Tonight I was thinking if there will ever be a Picasso of web design or a Mona Lisa of the web. Image a website who’s interface and user experience design is so awesome that we are struck in awe by it, that culture obsesses and write books on it.
Web Design too, like a painting as a medium, is currently embedded in a flat surface. But unlike painting, web design is generally an iterative process and interactive process. Painting too can be iterative but most photos capture its single essence. Web Design fortunately has tools and cultural knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work which have been granted to us by Swiss Designers, Constructivists, Brockman, Lissitisky, JQuery UI, Photoshop, Illustrator and etc. So Web Design has a different feeling that painting. By feeling I mean the creative process is different and thus the possibilities and rooted in technology of the material to create the site and not in sheer exploration (which has been done somewhat but we are still very limited by the very interpretation of the user interface and what that means…).
What I mean by iterative is that a website from 1994 looks way different and feels way different from a site made in 2011 (well a good site made in 2011… I think a brilliant site althought it is flash is by the design house wonderwall at www.wonder-wall.com ) It is also responsive to users feelings, and the cultural climate. So for a website to be good it has to change!
So I don’t know if there will ever be a true ‘Picasso’ of web design. Or if there will one day be a set of masterful principles. Also begs the question too of how do we preserve good web design, what was ‘crazy’, what worked, what was avante garde. Also capturing the trends of web design and the progress of web technology will be fascinating. Imagine a museum for websites… or an exhibition of websites… I think definite websites will be altavista, google, reddit, facebook, twitter, and etc, websites that become cultural entities.
I mean, are these ideas even relevant to the essence of web design?
So I was having a lot of trouble getting PIL to work with my django app. I found two articles http://www.jayzawrotny.com/blog/django-pil-and-libjpeg-on-ubuntu-1110 and http://jj.isgeek.net/2011/09/install-pil-with-jpeg-support-on-ubuntu-oneiric-64bits/. However, when I followed them some of the support parts would become available (such as libfreetype), but not specifically jpeg.
So I just created a symlink in the virtualenv-dir/lib/site-packages/ folder to the working version of PIL outside of the virtualenv.
Ran into this problem for the second time. So I am building a Django website which requires extensive use of images. I create the virtualenv and after syncdb’ing using south I run into an error.
You need pil (python imaging library)!!
So ok… I do
$ pip install pil
No avail. So issue a
$ deactivate to get out of the env
and (hopefully you have sudo access)
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev
Now, reactivate your development zone and try the pip install pil again. It should work!
I recently purchased a Macbook Pro to speed up my development process. This thing is quite fast compared to the netbook I was using. Yay!
The fist programming I undertook was redoing my wordpress site. I had to install MAMP. MAMP builds a production stack. Once that is up and running you can goto the localhost:port and edit from there.
For Django development I began to use Oracle’s VirtualBox (which I used this summer at an internship). Its quite straight forward, as long as you setup. So I did that now I wanted to edit the Django files from the Mac host using Textmate.
To get started
Download an Ubuntu.iso (Desktop version if you aren’t very comfortable with the CLI a server version would provide). Next, download VirtualBox. Install VirtualBox and there will be an option of where to boot from, choose the Ubuntu.iso file. Finally set up port forwarding.
After port forwarding in setup go into your virtual machine and open up a terminal. Make a directory called sample, this will be for demonstration:
$ mkdir sample
Next create a virtualenv for Django development. Virtualenv will give you a clean python install, meaning you won’t have to worry about other modules giving you functionality you can get on a server among other things… if you don’t have virtualenv already installed issue $ pip install virtualenv.
After you have installed the virtualenv do
$ virtualenv env
This will create a virtualenv in folder called env. Next activate the environment (to deactivate, type deactivate):
$ source env/bin/activate
To be sure you are in a clean environment type:
$ pip freeze
You should see only one or two Python modules. Next, install Django
$ pip install django
$ django-admin.py startproject sample
This will create the directories you need to begin to build your project.
On your Mac, Download SFTP software for your Mac. Right now I use Cyberduck. Connect your VirtualBox server. If you set up port forwarding according to the article, you will want to connect to port 2222 at the localhost server. What is happening is that the Ubuntu installation is communicating with VirtualBox which is then communicating with your real internet networking hardware. So we want to get to the little hole where VirtualBox is letting this happen, we do it through port forwarding.
If connecting is all well you will see a list of folders in Cyberduck, hopefully you’ll see sample.
Next, you want to open up the .py files with TextMate. You will notice they all open up seperated. Create a new TextMate project, click on the icon for the file you want to edit and drag it to the project. They should add themselves to said project.
Alternative way…
Kate is an editor which offers similar features to Textmate. In the Virtual machine in the terminal simply type in
$ sudo apt-get install kate
In my dream we are in the basement of List Art Center. The basement is flooded with water but someone has built a wood dock over the water. The water is a pinkish color with bubbles and the a lot of debris float on the top. I think the water is contaminated with all of the painting supplies that are dumped from List.
But the room is actually a gallery and some famous and not so famous artworks are being held up. In my dream, I have a memory of what I imagined this place to look like, it looks the same as my memory but some of the paintings are different and or gone.
I am with my teacher and 2 other pupils in the Visual Art’s Honors program. I think this part of the program is a tradition where the class goes to the basement and look at the painting and try to critique while staying above the pink water. I am mostly ok with the experience except near the end where the wood starts to break and bend under the pressure of our weight.
I then begin to ask the teacher questions… are we in the basement or on the roof (dumb questio?). After looking around the room I notice a small window and I can see what appears to be a neighborhood. After jumping around a bit we finally exit the place. We enter into a half flooded but well taken care neighborhood.
I have a recurring dream within a dream where I wake up in my parent’s house a house on a couch . The room looks the same but, when I get up and walk around I can see video prjctns on the wall. I think I have awoken what is the future. I literally lose it and I start flipping tables and chairs trying to figure out where I am. But no one pays me any mind. Finally, I see this old lady who is changing from old to young to old to young to not so young to old. She says that, “time has been destroyed.”
A few weeks ago I watched the documentary on the Designers Charles and Ray Eames. I felt the documentary did a good deal showing how they were ahead of the curve. James Franco, the narrator of the movie, espoused that the negative reaction to their show in the MOMA was because of form of their show. The show was in a bunch of rooms, there was a lot of text, detail, and images. In the end the conclusion was that the show could have been better suited for the internet. The show was international so I am not sure if this was only the American’s feelings.
Form as potential for Future
This got me thinking about Form as potential for Future. What happens when we try to use a material that just isn’t suited for the intended function? We can spend a lot of time researching and working within the boundaries of the form, or we can carry on and find new form without the boundaries and create new spaces. I think both paths could result in something incredible and new. But, I do think there is a point where you have to stop and really analyze and think what could be better suited for this? Has it already been invented?
What is form
To me form is how something takes shape in space: negative space, positive space. Be it an idea, a building, an art show, a painting, a chair.
What is future
Future isn’t necessarily progressive. Future which is progressive is tied into rationalistic/enlightened ideals. I view future as a naturally changing landscape, not necessarily progressive or even new.
Today I went to a lecture/speech by Richard Ting. He currently is an Executive Creative Director at R/GA. I enjoyed his talked, the insights he provided, and the questions my peers asked. A Professor was inquiring about R/GA and car advertisements. He said that R/GA produced some works for Subaru and that because of that he drives a Subaru. I chuckled as I remembered Ogilvy writing about if you’re going to make advertisements for a product you better damn well use it. I don’t know if that is as true today as it was back then. I think people are required to be ‘multidisciplinary’ and come on… even Microsoft has an Apple Division which produces products for Apple products (such as Word).
Insights
- Reinvent your agency every 8 – 9 Years
R/GA started out as a special effects company. Go figure.
- Advertisements are embedded in utility
Oh sweet, Walmart released a new phone app to help mothers shop while perusing through the store. Yeah, this is an advertisement. Also they might even get you to produce some free labor while using the app.
- Mobile is the future platform for advertisements
I agree. Mobile devices are virtually human satellites. Just need some more convergence… ie lets track your buying habits, how much you stay in building X, etc metrics
