I'm sure many of you have heard of Gwen Stefani's song "Harajuku Girls". Well, meet my friend Richard, the real "Harajuku Boy"! Part of our mission to Japan this year was to find a store called Bape in Harajuku Tokyo. For the uninitiated, Harajuku is the fashion mecca of Japan, and my friend Rich was determined to experience it by shopping at a really cool store called Bape! I am told that Bape stands for Bathing Ape but have no clue as to why it is so named. Prior to visiting, all I knew was that Bape was going to have really cool hip-hop and urban street clothes for sale, and that my friend Rich really wanted to go visit.
So you would think that a popular store like Bape would be very easy to find, right? WRONG! They had this place hidden better than Jimmy Hoffa! We walked past this place over and over before Rich finally peeked over the railing and spotted it downstairs. Take a look at this picture and tell me if you could tell that Bape is located down the flight of stairs with the white hand railing. Bape is not the store you see on the street level when you walk by, it is literally hidden downstairs. Now in hindsight this actually makes some sense since the directions we were getting from nearby shop owners always had something to do with "going down". At the time we assumed "going down" meant going down the street, not going down some stairs.
The street level store that was above Bape was the Billionaire Boys Club. According to Rich this is another "hip" store that actually has a connection to Bape. I was really glad that Rich was able to shop at Bape. I myself am actually much too un-hip to truly appreciate what they sell there. Any place that sells camouflaged boxer shorts for $50 bucks a piece is definitely not the kind of place that I usually shop at. If you were to ask me my impression of Bape I would tell you I remember an Ape face, a lot of camouflaged items and everything priced with way too many zeros after it. I guess I'll stick to Sears and Macy's.
