Ape shall exploit ape.

If not at one of A Busy Workshop's painfully hip and sparsely stocked boutiques, kids will pay $100 US or more for one of the relatively simple silkscreened T-shirts you'll see Nigo creating here [via PSFK's "me-too" site of fashion links].

The issue that's bothered me over four or so years of watching Nigo, Bape and A Bathing Ape gain notoriety is, you can't tell a knock-off from an original -- primarily because the design is so easily imitated, and actually stolen from Planet Of The Apes. Nigo built his career on infringing on the film's intellectual property, in fact. He branched out to borrow heavily from Nike's Dunk (or fakes thereof), too. The cool-hunters of the world quietly ignore this fact, presumably so they don't blow major holes through their own inflated senses of "cool". That is so not-cool.

I hope the video is a lesson to us all: don't buy ridiculously priced T-shirts; make your own. That's how Nigo got rich. Otherwise, you might settle for an imposter on eBay, because you'll get the same look for a fraction of the expense. I'd rather have the cash and the look than the demented satisfaction of paying an amount that would've bought plenty of supplies to start my own shirt line. But that's me.

If Nigo wants to curb the bootlegging (which fans of Bape must support at least in principle, since Bape itself is predicated on bootlegs of Planet Of The Apes imagery), he needs more sophisticated designs. Nigo's camo patterns are mediocre; he's no Maharishi. The promo video only underscores the simplicity of much of his design, meaning it's the demand he's manufactured that's really made his brand. But that demand seems like it might be little more than a revisitation of the large-scale merchandising of the original Planet Of The Apes film series.