Dear Shaded Viewers,
SUPERBAPE CUP is what happens when Harajuku mythology, Brooklyn mischief and World Cup fever all decide to share the same pair of patent leather shoes.
We thought we’d seen everything from the BAPE STA – that sneaker born in Ura-Harajuku in 2001 and quietly upgraded from Japanese street cult to global emblem of individual expression. For its 25th anniversary, A BATHING APE and KidSuper have found one of their most disarming, and frankly most touching, ideas yet: the SUPERBAPE CUP, a fantasy world cup where creativity is scored less in goals than in colour palettes.
KidSuper translates the universal language of football into 48 BAPE STA pairs, each dedicated to a country, as if every national team were gifted a patent-leather away kit for its feet. Each pair borrows the nation’s colours, refracted through Colm Dillane’s expressive, slightly mischievous eye, becoming a chromatic atlas of liquefied flags and playful patriotisms.
Crafted in BAPE’s signature patent leather, the shoes gleam like mini trophies, just loud enough to turn the street into a polished playing field. Ten colourways – Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Ghana, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and the United States – escape the screen to land in physical stores, while all 48 live as online pre-orders, a kind of luxury Panini album you wear instead of peel.
The real masterstroke isn’t in the sole, but in the casting: 48 grandmothers, each from one of the represented countries, become the faces of the campaign. They do not pose as models but as custodians of memory, wearing the pair of their nation the way one wears a story, a ritual, a fragment of oral history.
This gallery of portraits turns a sneaker collaboration into a meditation on belonging, identity and the way gestures survive through generations. Colm Dillane describes the project as a parallel between the world’s biggest football tournament and New York’s daily choreography of cultures, and these grandmothers in BAPE STA stand as proof that streetwear and wisdom can share the same crosswalk.
SUPERBAPE CUP reads as a bridge between Harajuku and Brooklyn, between the almost liturgical discipline of the STA logo and the joyful chaos of the KidSuper laboratory. BAPE has long framed “Fearless Expression” as its north star, pushing its iconography into dialogue with art, music and a global youth culture that no longer respects borders, only frequencies.
KidSuper, for its part, is less a brand than an ongoing performance piece, where clothing coexists with comedy, theatre, music videos, football matches and art installations without any need to rank them. Colm Dillane still cultivates a deliberate childlike bravado – that moment when you believe everything is possible – which he has carried from his Brooklyn studio to LVMH prizes, Louis Vuitton collaborations and now the glowing leather of the SUPERBAPE CUP.
The ten selected colourways take up residence at KidSuper’s Brooklyn outpost on Roebling Street and a constellation of BAPE STORE locations in London, Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong and Shanghai. It’s a fairly accurate cartography of contemporary sneaker culture: a network of urban pilgrimage sites where one goes as much to belong as to buy.
These BAPE STA can be read as tickets to an alternative world cup, one where the stands are filled with grandmothers in patent leather, national anthems are sung in technicolor, and fair play is measured in how lightly you can carry your roots. SUPERBAPE CUP does not choose between fashion, art and sport; it stacks them, layer upon layer, like coats of gloss on a single sneaker.
Later,
Diane
