Human Made Undercover: Nigo's Tokyo Reunion
The human made undercover acquisition, reported by Business of Fashion on 15 June 2026, is not a deal — it is a reunion bookkept. Nigo’s Human Made, the Tokyo workwear label he founded in 2010 after losing creative control of A Bathing Ape, has bought Undercover from Jun Takahashi, the designer he shared a 30-square-metre back-street shop with in 1993. Both men were born within fifteen months of each other in Gunma prefecture — Takahashi in Kiryu on 21 September 1969, Nigo (Tomoaki Nagao) in Maebashi on 23 December 1970. Both ended up under Hiroshi Fujiwara’s wing in late-1980s Harajuku. The Nowhere store they opened together on 1 April 1993, a half-block off Meiji-dori in the alley network Tokyo magazines christened Ura-Harajuku, was the seed of every Japanese streetwear export of the next three decades. Thirty-three years later, the back room and the front room are on the same balance sheet. ...