On one of the hottest San Francisco days of the year so far, a small but devout sect of hypebeasts was looking for a different kind of heat. Outside of A Bathing Ape’s new store at 216 Stockton St., fans of the pioneering Japanese streetwear brand founded by the designer, DJ, and cult hero Nigo were sweating through their baggy tees.
The late Thursday morning crowd at Bape (as it’s commonly known) was about 20 people deep, with some folks who queued up before the shop opened at 11 a.m. The crowd was heavy with teens on summer break, families decked out in designer garb, and a handful of out-of-towners.
As far as major streetwear brands go, Bape is on the scarcer end, with less than 10 shops across the country. With its grand opening on Saturday, Bape’s two-story Union Square shop is only the third on the West Coast. (Fourth, if you count Vancouver.)
Santa Rosa residents Sterling Lynn, 19, and Hailie Carlsen, 20, had been waiting for 20 minutes by the time I spoke to them. They hoped that the heat would dissuade more people from queueing up and that the city would be cooler than the North Bay. This was their first time inside a stateside Bape; the last outpost they went to was in Japan during a school trip. They also had plans to stop by Postscript. (I didn’t have the heart to tell them it’s now a Loveski.)
“We thought the city's gonna be cooler,” Carlsen said, referring to San Francisco’s weather, not its culture. “Then we got here, and we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s the same.’”
Everyone expected the line to be worse. Rina Sumibcay, who was in line with her husband Anthony and their 2-year-old Xavier, told me that a friend and fellow Bape enthusiast waited for almost three hours to enter the store on opening day. Passing the store on Tuesday, Sumibcay saw that the line stretched well past the Burberry outpost on Geary Blvd. and Grant Ave.
Like their fellow line-waiters, the Sumibcay family was impressively Baped out, wearing coordinated shirts featuring the ape logo. The real highlight was Xavier’s baby shoes, which were also Bape, and featured an adorable character named Baby Milo.
More troubling than the heat or even the line was the lack of availability of items. Within 15 minutes of my arrival, a store worker confirmed that Bape’s World Cup-themed collaboration with the brand KidSuper — a limited-edition run of 48 sneakers representing each participant country, with only 10 available in stores — was not available, despite a promised Thursday in-store arrival.
Rina was looking to purchase a San Francisco-exclusive Bape T-shirt. (Bape, like many streetwear stores and Starbucks, sells city-exclusive items to compel tourists to collect them all.) She hoped to add to her her trifecta of West Coast T-shirts; she already owns the LA- and Vegas-branded shirts. I didn’t ask if she planned to go to Vancouver.
Alas, I overheard a store clerk telling the family that the SF-themed shirt had just sold out, less than two hours after the store had opened for the day. Still, the lack of exclusive drops didn’t deter her or the rest of the family from shopping. It seems like it didn’t deter anyone else, either. Outside, the queue had grown twice as long even as the temperature was ten degrees hotter.
