Design Museum: NIGO – From Japan with Love

The Design Museum’s major summer exhibition charts the thirty-year career of NIGO, the Japanese creative director behind A Bathing Ape and later Kenzo, in a retrospective that brings together over 700 objects drawn from his private archive of more than 10,000 pieces. This is the first time NIGO’s work has been presented in a museum context outside Japan.

The show, From Japan with Love, is structured across four thematic sections and includes a recreation of NIGO’s teenage bedroom, hand-thrown ceramics and a life-size glass tea house. The curatorial scope extends across fashion, music, architecture and interior design, reflecting a career that has consistently operated at the intersection of cultural disciplines rather than within any single one.

For design professionals with an interest in how creative identity is built and sustained across decades, the exhibition offers a substantial body of work to examine. NIGO’s collaborations with Nike, Louis Vuitton, Uniqlo and a wide range of other brands give the retrospective a breadth that goes beyond fashion history into broader questions of design, craft and cultural exchange.