A replica of Tomoaki Nagao’s teenage bedroom – minus the bed – opens an exhibition about the Japanese fashion designer and musician, better known as Nigö.
If you’re familiar with his work, then you will probably love the exhibition, but candidly, I found myself wondering who this person is and why he is worthy of an entire exhibition.
He’s obviously successful, and yet I had never ever heard of him. I may not have an in-depth finger on the pulse of the fashion world, but surely I would have at least heard the name in passing. But nope, nothing. Reading up about him prior to the exhibition didn’t really help to understand why he is popular.
And frustratingly, the exhibition left me just as bewildered.
We seem to have someone who jumps around a lot from one thing to another, seemingly a businessman who has a deft hand at marketing himself.
He clearly has a love of old American culture, but I found that a lot of what was on display seemed to be aping that rather than fresh creations inspired by it. A t-shirt with an image of an American peanut brand could be a £2 t-shirt given away as freebies by the brand, or a £2,000 copy by Nigö – it really wasn’t possible to tell the difference. Likewise a denim jacket we’re told is so slavishly copied from the original that the stitches line up. Is that a creative process?
And probably most grating was the hagiographic descriptions that seemed to have been written by Nigö’s publicist rather than by an objective museum curator. If anything, this seems to be an exhibition that is a sales tool set up by Nigö’s marketing department to promote Brand Nigo to a new generation of potential customers.
If you’re a Nigö fan, then you will probably love worshipping at Temple Nigo, but if you’ve never heard of him, I can’t really see the point of this sales brochure.
The exhibition, Nigö: From Japan with Love, is at the Design Museum until 4th October 2026.
Details here.