Long before social media turned many a clothing store into photo backdrops, some brands went bold purely for the love of the game. Take NIGO’s A Bathing Ape stores in the 2000s, for example. Designed by Tokyo-based architecture studio Wonderwall, they put sneakers on conveyor belts and displayed clothes like museum pieces; blinding white subway tiles and LED-lit staircases met slick, shiny chrome fixtures. 

It was experiential retail before experiential retail was a thing, giving BAPE a space-age vibe not unlike a hypebeast Jetsons.

If those stores helped cement NIGO as one of streetwear’s most exciting talents, his latest retail trick for Human Made proves he still has the sauce. The brand’s first proper flagship, occupying three floors in Harajuku and designed by Tokyo design studio I IN, modernizes everything that made the BAPE stores shine (literally and figuratively). 

At four times the size of the prior Human Made stores, the Tokyo location stacks the brand's full range on gleaming shelves — including its first original sneaker, the trail-shoe-ish Duck Kick. It keeps the BAPE-era emphasis on industrial elements, but where those stores felt like spaceships, this one uses glass and stainless steel to create an open-faced warehouse; the normally hidden stockrooms are fully exposed, revealing product piled in storage containers just out of reach.

The transparency extends to the shopping experience. While the old-school route of, you know, talking to staffers is still an option, there’s also a way to do things fully digitally. Customers can scan any product’s QR code with their phone to place an order, pinging staff to pull it from those containers in real time. It's a touch Amazon tech-brain, but interesting given the prevailing trend in other luxury clothing stores is using warm tones and earthy materials like wood and stone to create something that feels completely disconnected from a brand's digital presence. 

Human Made has always lived by the motto that “the future is in the past,” and the Tokyo flagship is no exception. The BAPE lineage is clear, but the store’s blend of the digital and physical feels entirely fresh. 

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