BAPE Baby Milo Parachute T-shirt

This A Bathing Ape (BAPE) Baby Milo Parachute Tee cost me $73. What? $73 dollars for a t-shirt? Now look, I'm well aware that there's no way to justify that kind of money for a screen printed t-shirt, no matter how high quality or detailed it is, and even if it's manufactured in Japan and imported in with a crazy currency exchange rate. But it's worth $73 to me because I love the BAPE brand, I love that it's part of the culture I grew up in, and I love the exclusivity you get with BAPE.

BAPE is a Japanese apparel and lifestyle brand created by Tomoaki "Nigo" Nagao, a music producer and DJ for the Japanese hip hop group Teriyaki Boyz. The brand really blew up here in the US when musicians Kanye West and Pharrell started sporting BAPE gear.

So why are BAPE products so pricey? Basically, it's because they're produced in limited quantities, are only available for a limited time, and are only available from official BAPE stores--most of them located in Japan. There's only two BAPE stores in the entire US, one in Los Angeles and one in New York. I actually cop'd this shirt when I visited the BAPE store in NYC (wrote about that here).

Other than dealing with a handful known-good eBay vendors (Pondon, Plainflour, Tokyoape) the only place you can cop legit BAPE products online is at the official BAPE website [link]. Everything else you see online is probably fake (FAPE) because BAPE gear is heavily bootlegged.