For the past year, Nigo has been professionalizing Bape’s senior management team, which until now had been drawn almost entirely from the 300 employees who work in the retail stores. “The present staff would not be able to handle a high-growth environment,” says one fashion-industry observer. Nigo agrees. “We need to become a little more like other companies. I would even be willing to bring in an outside C.E.O. We may not choose to do things the normal way, but we need to at least know what normal is,” he says.

Eighteen-year-old Tomoaki Nagao moved to Tokyo in 1986 from Maebashi, a town in rural Gunma prefecture, to attend the prestigious fashion college Bunka Fukuso Gakuin, where he majored in—of all things—fashion writing. He had already discovered hip-hop and was obsessed with the style and lifestyle of the movement, even though he couldn’t quite understand what Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys were actually rapping about.

Upon arriving in Tokyo, the diminutive, precocious fashionista—his bags full of vintage denim, rare 12-inch hip-hop singles, and Adidas sneakers—found himself amid kindred countercultural spirits in the city’s late-’80s alternative scene. “Japanese designers were doing high fashion, imitating international styles,” Nigo says. “The shops weren’t selling anything new or cool. We thought streetwear—the stuff in skate shops or maybe what Stussy was doing—seemed more exciting.”

During his college days, Nigo, who typically wore a Rat Bones skater hat and a bomber jacket, took a job at a curry shop in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. “I would take the bus to Shibuya district, spend my salary on rare vinyl, and then go back to my apartment and spin,” he recalls. His twin direct-drive Technics turntables sat atop a low table on the tatami mats of his 80-square-foot apartment, which was crammed with crates of records, North Face parkas, and Adidas Superstars. He remained a fashion obsessive, a connoisseur who could discern the most prized editions of various American vintage brands—Dickies, Carhartt, Levi’s—and such streetwear brands as Stussy and XLarge.

Nigo graduated in 1989, just as the prosperity of Japan’s bubble era was giving way to a generational malaise. Some called this generation the ’89ers. These kids basically got to the party after all the foie gras had been eaten.

Nigo, along with his col­lege buddy Jun Takahashi, later the founder of the high-fashion line Undercover, became one of the era’s leading cool hunters, writing a monthly magazine column that became a primary style guide for a generation of Japanese kids. Before the explosion of the internet, information about street fashion was much harder to find, and those who sought it had to rely on trend magazines, which sprang up in Japan to cater to otaku—obsessives who care about the precise type of rivet on a particular year’s Levi’s or how many eyelets are on a certain pair of Troop sneakers. Nigo’s heroes were Kan Takagi and Hiroshi Fujiwara, the founders of Major Force, a hip-hop act. Fujiwara started the successful brands Good Enough and Head Porter, a lifestyle-products company. (The striking physical similarity between Nigo and Fujiwara gave Nigo his nickname: Fujiwara No. 2, or just No. 2—nigou in Japanese.)

“There was this reaction against commercialized, mainstream youth culture of the ’80s,” says Tiffany Godoy, author of Style Deficit Disorder: Harajuku Street Fashion. “These guys understood this and used these magazines to channel the market in this new direction.” The cool kids who flocked to Tokyo from all over Japan convened in Harajuku to check each other out and hunt for clothes in the narrow warren of streets behind the main shopping drag. “We were like treasure hunters,” Fujiwara says. “I would go to thrift stores in the Midwest and pick out the best denim, the rarest jeans, and they would be selling for the same price as the crappy stuff. And we could bring it back and show it in the magazines. Japanese kids developed a really good eye for that stuff.” This crowd is to blame, then, for those $400 jeans in the window of New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue today.