“Nigo was a DJ—producer, even—so he was a fan of the Star Trak era of music, everything that came out in those early stages of our sound,” Pusha says. “Pharrell and I were together at Jacob the Jeweler’s spot and he was telling us about this guy in Japan: ‘He comes in and he buys every piece of jewelry that you have.’” Eventually, the meeting was arranged and Nigo and Pharrell became fast friends. Though they were speaking exclusively through a translator, they were still speaking the same language. Both men understood fashion well and were possessed by rap’s growing relationship to it. “Pharrell flew out to meet [Nigo] first. He came back home—we were living together at the time—and packages would just start coming to the house,” Pusha says. “Shoes, hoodies—in abundance. Carpets, rugs, towels. We just thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I remember putting on the shoes and my homeboys being like, ‘You got on fake-ass Nikes.’ We became known as the guys with the fake Nikes.”

Eventually, being “the guys with the fake Nikes” turned into being the guys with the most exclusive kicks around, but while Clipse made Bape a staple of their fashion repertoire for its chic appeal, it was Nigo’s ethos that was most attractive to Pusha. “I got to go over there [to Japan] for Bape’s 10th anniversary, and I got to see that this is a world,” he says. “This isn’t a brand; it’s a whole world. The Rolls Royces have Bape paint jobs. There are Bape cafes. And we admired that it was his, and everything was about his crew and his team and they all were just in unison.” There was something very hip-hop about how Nigo had built his empire: inclusive and curatorial, pulling from all over for inspiration, but putting crew and community first. It continues to resonate.

As Bape was beginning to style some of American rap’s biggest names, Nigo was launching his Yokohama rap group Teriyaki Boyz with the full backing of the U.S. rap community that had embraced his fashions. The group’s Def Jam debut was produced by a star-studded cast, including DJ Premier, Just Blaze, Ad-Rock, and, of course, the Neptunes; they did songs with Kanye West at his chart-topping peak. They were “Bape’s rap group,” promotional tools for the brand and an outlet for Nigo’s unending love of rap music. Their success ran parallel with the label’s U.S. breakthrough. “That’s when everybody in the States was wearing (A Bathing) Ape,” Teriyaki Boyz’ Verbal told The Japan Times. “Lil Wayne, Jay-Z — they were talking about it in their rap. Going to the Ape showroom was like going to Mecca in Tokyo.” Pharrell and Nigo created Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream retailers together in 2005. Wayne covered Vibe in one of Bape’s signature hoodies the next year. By 2007, a young rapper named Soulja Boy had uploaded a video for a song called “I Got Me Some Bapes” to a fledgling platform called YouTube. By that fall, Snoop Dogg was in the Bape lookbook. In just a few years time, Bape had become a part of the fabric of rap culture in America, and the rappers who wear it now are, in part, paying homage to that legacy.

In the States, A Bathing Ape quickly came to represent peak streetwear crossing the threshold into being something more, an idea best summed up by Meechy Darko on Flatbush Zombies’ “Bounce”: “Bape if she hip, Saint Laurent if she bougie.” It was streetwear as high fashion before streetwear had broached those spaces. It feels more than symbolic that Virgil Abloh considers the brand formative.