BAPE and Stray Kids Run It Back

A year after SKZOO first moved into BABY MILO’s world, BAPE Korea has set October 17 for a second Stray Kids link, teased in three words: moving as one.

The announcement gave away almost nothing, which is often how these things start. BAPE’s Korean account posted the announcement this week with a caption of three words, “Moving as one,” followed by a single date, October 17, a tag for Stray Kids’ official account, and the hashtags #BAPExStrayKids and #SKZOO. That Saturday is the release day for the second collaboration between A Bathing Ape and the eight-member group from JYP Entertainment, arriving almost exactly a year after the first. No lineup, prices or stockists have been published, and at the time of writing the news had not yet appeared on BAPE’s global channels.

 

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The hashtags carry most of the information. SKZOO is the group’s set of eight animal characters, one for each member, and for the 2025 collection BAPE redrew all of them inside the world of BABY MILO, its own mascot. Tagging the characters again points to them returning in some form, though nothing more specific has been confirmed.

Signal. What happened: BAPE Korea announced a second BAPE x Stray Kids collision with a teaser captioned “Moving as one.” and a rel date, a year after the brands’ first collection. Exact object: the second BAPE x Stray Kids collection; individual pieces, prices and SKUs have not yet been disclosed. When and where: Saturday, October 17, 2026, announced through BAPE’s Korean channel; specific stores and online channels have not been confirmed. Source: BAPE Korea’s official Instagram announcement, tagging Stray Kids. Why it matters: a one-off fan collaboration becomes a recurring partnership, timed to Stray Kids’ Run It World Tour and arriving after BAPE opened a dedicated flagship in Seoul. Earlier DRIFT: BAPE’s Moon Collection 2026 Mid-Autumn capsule, and FENDI’s Baguette Re-Edition 2026 campaign, whose cast included Stray Kids’ Bang Chan.

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Whatever arrives on Saturday, the 2025 collection is the template to measure it against. BAPE framed that release around two milestones: KARMA, the group’s fourth studio album, and the encore of the Dominate World Tour, which closed with two nights at Incheon Asiad Main Stadium on October 18 and 19, 2025. That tour ran to 56 shows across 35 regions, and Billboard’s tour data, as cited by Outlook India, put its gross at about $185.7 million. The centerpiece was the Shark Full Zip Hoodie, the BAPE signature, rebuilt eight ways. Each member chose a favorite COLOR CAMO and three embroidered letters for his version, and the SKZOO characters peered out from between the teeth of the shark face. In Korea it was priced at ₩609,000.

The choice of garment was deliberate. BAPE introduced the Shark Full Zip Hoodie in 2004, borrowing the shark mouths painted on military aircraft and zipping the hood all the way over the face so the whole head becomes the graphic. For the hoodie’s 20th anniversary in 2024, BAPE released the Shark STA, its first sneaker drawn directly from one of its own garments, alongside a Country Pack of flag-inspired hoodies and Shark STAs, with Korea among the featured countries. Handing the hoodie to eight members to personalize took that anniversary idea and applied it to a single group.

Around it sat a wider spread of smaller pieces. There was a College tee, a set of BABY MILO tees (nine designs in Japan at ¥15,400 each, among them a Family Graphic tee carrying all eight characters and single-character versions such as Dwaekki and Jiniret), metal pins at ₩39,000 in Korea, keyrings and scrunchies. Footwear came through a reworked BAPE STA, offered exclusively by BAPE, with COLOR CAMO treatments drawn from all eight members and lace clips shaped like SKZOO and BABY MILO so buyers could customize their own pair.

The rollout ran in stages, and the first stage fell on a familiar date. Korea went first, with a limited-quantity online pre-release through the FANS app at 2 p.m. on Friday, October 17, 2025, so this year’s date repeats last year’s exactly. The global release followed on October 29 through Stray Kids’ online fan shop and BAPE’s own channels, with launch events in Seoul and Shanghai. The Shark Hoodie and BAPE STA were held back for December, and in Japan BAPE’s announcement placed the hoodie in its Harajuku, Shibuya, Osaka, Kyoto and Fukuoka stores from December 7, 2025.

Demand showed up before any of it was on sale. When BAPE first teased the partnership in 2025, nss magazine reported that the post passed a thousand comments and ten thousand reshares on Instagram within a few hours, and framed the partnership as a test of whether K-pop fandoms could lift fashion sales in a slow market. The aftermarket has told a similar story since. On KREAM, the Korean resale platform, asks for the pink Shark Full Zip Hoodie built around Leebit, Lee Know’s character, ranged at the time of writing from ₩400,000 for a medium to ₩1,950,000 for an XL, more than three times the original price at the top end.

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The way BAPE built the first collection says something about where Stray Kids now sit in fashion. Several members already hold individual luxury roles. Hyunjin was named Versace’s global ambassador in July 2023, Felix became a Louis Vuitton house ambassador the following month after a front-row appearance caught Nicolas Ghesquière’s eye, Bang Chan joined Fendi in January 2025, and Lee Know was later announced as a global ambassador for Gucci. The thread runs back to 2021, when Lee Know, Felix and Hyunjin fronted Etro’s Earthbeat sneaker campaign, and Felix has since walked the runway for Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2025 show. In 2024, W Korea printed seventeen covers of the group with each member dressed by a different house, a moment one roundup of the members’ fashion ties treated as proof of the group’s pull with luxury brands.

The BAPE merge took another route. Instead of putting eight faces on the clothes, it worked through SKZOO, the group’s own character family, and placed those characters inside BABY MILO’s world. Each member’s presence came through his animal, his chosen camo and his three letters rather than his photograph, which suited a brand that has spent more than two decades turning a cartoon ape into a business. It also produced a price ladder that ran from ₩39,000 pins to the ₩609,000 hoodie, so the same drop could serve a fan buying a keyring and a collector chasing a specific member’s Shark Hoodie.

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The second collide also lands in a different BAPE Korea from the one that hosted the first. The brand has had a presence in Seoul since 2011, when it opened a store on the fifth floor of a building in Chungmuro 1-ga, Jung-gu. When it announced the 2025 Stray Kids collection, BAPE described the partnership as the opening of a new chapter built around expanding its footprint in South Korea, and the expansion followed within two months. BAPE STORE DOSAN SEOUL opened at 645 Sinsa-dong in Gangnam on December 23, 2025, with stone and oak finishes, fixtures engraved with camo, BABY MILO details throughout and a lounge-style basement furnished with BAPE HOME pieces. This time the teaser went out from BAPE’s Korean account first.

 

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BABY MILO has been doing a great deal of work across BAPE’s autumn. The character, introduced in 1999, has become a recurring host for the brand’s partnerships. In the last month alone it has carried the 2026 Moon Collection for Mid-Autumn Festival on September 19, a BAPE x STITCH range pairing Disney’s Stitch and Angel with BABY MILO from October 3, and a Halloween collection of glow-in-the-dark BABY MILO skull pieces from October 9. For a label Nigo founded in Ura-Harajuku in 1993, and which has been majority-owned by Hong Kong’s I.T Group since 2011, the mascot is now as central to the business as the camo and the APE HEAD.

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On the other side of the partnership is a group that rarely stops moving, which makes “Moving as one” a fitting caption. Stray Kids were formed through an Mnet survival program of the same name that premiered on October 17, 2017, nine years to the day before Saturday’s release. JYP founder Park Jin-young eliminated contestants along the way, but viewer support eventually saw every one of them debut. The group debuted in 2018 with nine members and has been eight since Woojin’s departure in 2019: Bang Chan, Lee Know, Changbin, Hyunjin, Han, Felix, Seungmin and I.N. The group largely produces its own music through 3RACHA, the in-house team of Bang Chan, Changbin and Han. Noeasy became their first million-selling album in 2021, and by May 2026 Stray Kids had sold more than 40 million albums across Korean and Japanese releases. KARMA, the album the first BAPE collection celebrated, gave the partnership a heavy commercial backdrop. Released on August 22, 2025, with every one of its 11 tracks made by 3RACHA, it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 313,000 equivalent units, making Stray Kids the first act whose first seven entries on that chart all opened at the top. By late September it was the best-selling album in the United States for the year so far, according to Luminate figures reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, with around 400,000 physical copies sold, and it went on to collect album-of-the-year honors through the 2026 awards season in Korea.

The first BAPE drop landed between two releases: a month after the encore came the EP DO IT on November 21, 2025, which Luminate later ranked fourth among U.S. album sales for 2025, two places behind KARMA. Their 2026 has been just as crowded. In March they marked their eighth anniversary with the digital single “Stay,” and in late June they opened a new era with the pre-release single “Run It,” ahead of the EP This & That and the Japanese EP Suiatsu. The Run It World Tour began in Seoul on July 25 and is scheduled to run through Asia until a final date in Singapore on March 7, 2027. That puts Saturday’s release in the middle of a tour leg rather than at the end of one, the reverse of last year, when the first collection was pegged to an encore. The next show after the release is at Mizuho PayPay Dome Fukuoka on October 24, followed by Kai Tak Stadium in Hong Kong on December 5.

unconfirmed

Most of the practical detail is still missing. BAPE Korea has not named the pieces, published prices or sizes, or said where they will be sold. Last year’s Korean pre-release ran through the FANS app; whether that channel returns, or whether BAPE STORE DOSAN SEOUL takes a larger role, has not been stated. There is also no word yet on an international release, which in 2025 followed the Korean pre-release by twelve days, or on whether the Shark Hoodie and BAPE STA, last year’s headline pieces, will come back in new form. The teaser itself confirms the partners, the date and the characters, and little else. Last year’s pattern suggests the details may not take long: the lineup and Korean prices for the first collection surfaced on October 13, 2025, four days before the pre-release.

The timing, at least, is fixed. The collection lands on Saturday, October 17, one week before Stray Kids take the Run It tour to Mizuho PayPay Dome Fukuoka on October 24.