The APEE x BABYMONSTER Capsule Landing This Weekend

A pop up on Jingumae’s back streets is about to get very loud. On July 18, APEE and BABYMONSTER open “Kawaii Monster Power Up!” to the public.

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• A Saturday Drop With a Specific Address
• Why a K-Pop Group Landed at a Harajuku Institution
• The Horn as a Design Language
• Inside the Pieces: What Actually Ships July 18
• Where It Sits Inside a Bigger Ambassador Push
• What This Signals About APEE’s Direction

Shibuya ward’s Jingumae district has hosted A Bathing Ape’s various offshoots for decades, and its youth focused women’s line, APEE, is opening its pop up store on Saturday, July 18, 2026 with a joint capsule built entirely around its new brand ambassador, the YG Entertainment girl group BABYMONSTER. The collection carries its own name, “Kawaii Monster Power Up!,” and multiple outlets covering the Hong Kong and Taiwan retail markets have confirmed the same date across channels: the APEE pop up location plus designated stores in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, alongside APEE’s official online storefront, all going live simultaneously.

That coordinated, multi market rollout is worth noting on its own. Collisions tied to K-pop acts often stagger by territory, prioritizing the artist’s home market first. This one appears designed to hit fans in several countries at the same hour, which tracks with how globally distributed BABYMONSTER’s fanbase, known as MONSTIEZ, has become since the group’s 2023 debut.

 

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A post shared by APEE BY *A BATHING APE® (@apeestore_official)

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The ambassador relationship did not begin with this capsule. Back in June, APEE announced BABYMONSTER as the face of its 2026 summer collection, framing the partnership less as an endorsement deal and more as a community campaign under the hashtag ApeeSquad. The pitch from APEE at the time centered on range: the group’s seven members cover ground from the preppy, collegiate end of the brand’s catalog to its harder edged street pieces, and APEE wanted a single face that could plausibly wear all of it.

That framing matters for understanding why a capsule followed just weeks later rather than the relationship staying at the level of a single campaign shoot. When a brand positions an ambassador as embodying its entire stylistic range rather than one specific product line, a dedicated capsule is often the next logical step, since it lets the partnership produce something concrete and purchasable rather than remaining confined to advertising.

APEE itself sits under the umbrella of A Bathing Ape, the Harajuku label that Nigo founded in 1993 and that has spent three decades cycling through waves of relevance in global streetwear, from its late 1990s and 2000s peak through several rounds of reinvention. APEE functions as the brand’s Gen Z facing women’s line, distinct from the menswear heavy core label and from sister lines like AAPE and Baby Milo.

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The capsule’s visual anchor is a horn motif, a small devil horn silhouette that recurs across the pieces as embroidery, as a plush accessory element, and as a graphic. According to reporting from Hong Kong’s Korea Star Daily and other regional outlets that previewed the collection ahead of release, the horn was chosen specifically to echo BABYMONSTER’s own visual branding, which has leaned into a slightly mischievous, monster themed identity since the group’s earliest promotional cycles.

Layered against that horn motif is APEE’s existing signature vocabulary: its heart graphic, its ABC camouflage print (a house pattern the brand has run through countless permutations over the years), and assorted street inspired icons. The combination is meant to read as what regional coverage has described as an “ultra kawaii street” aesthetic, sweet on the surface with a harder edge underneath, which lines up with how APEE has talked about its ambassador’s range since the June announcement.

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The centerpiece item circulating in regional previews is a zip up hoodie built around APEE’s ABC Multi Camo print, cut in a short, oversized silhouette. The hood carries a raised, plush three dimensional horn detail, and the chest features an embroidered APEE x BABYMONSTER badge. It is being offered in three colorways: a pink version, a blue version, and a multicolor gradient. Camo prints paired with hearts and star graphics run across the fabric itself rather than sitting as isolated logo placements, which keeps the piece visually busy in a way that reads intentional for a capsule aimed at a younger, collector minded buyer.

 

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A post shared by BABYMONSTER (베이비몬스터) (@babymonster_ygofficial)

Beyond apparel, the release also includes a run of collectible accessories, a detail regional coverage flagged as significant on its own. APEE appears to be treating this less as a straightforward clothing drop and more as something closer to a fandom artifact, with the accessories positioned for MONSTIEZ who want a way into the collaboration beyond a hoodie or tee. That instinct lines up with a broader pattern in K-pop adjacent fashion collaborations generally, where merchandise tied to a group’s specific visual identity, in this case the horn, tends to outperform apparel that merely slaps a logo on an existing silhouette.

Pricing for the individual pieces has not been confirmed in the sources available at the time of writing, and neither has a full, itemized list of every style in the capsule. Regional previews have focused heavily on the hoodie as the hero piece, with looser references to “personality apparel, trend accessories, and highly interactive limited collectibles” making up the rest of the range. Anyone planning to shop the drop in person should expect a queue at the Jingumae pop up given how APEE has handled prior high profile ambassador tie ins, including its earlier 2026 summer campaign activations, which included signed member posters given out with in store purchases while supplies lasted.

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This capsule is the second major consumer facing moment in APEE’s relationship with BABYMONSTER inside of about six weeks. The first was the June rollout of APEE’s full 2026 summer collection, which used individual members to model different corners of the brand’s range: one member styled in a retro, campus leaning ringer tee paired with camouflage wide leg pants, another in a color blocked camo piece with heart detailing, and others positioned in APEE’s softer, preppy leaning White Line, which debuted in that same season as a quieter counterpoint to the brand’s louder main line.

That earlier campaign also introduced the seasonal “Hawaii Drop,” a beach themed sub release built around a tropical flower and camo mashup bikini alongside easier separates meant to layer over swimwear, which suggests APEE has been running a fairly aggressive release cadence through the middle of 2026 rather than treating the BABYMONSTER partnership as a single moment.

Read together, the sequence looks deliberate: announce the ambassador, ship a broad seasonal collection that lets each member represent a different facet of the brand, then follow with a tightly themed capsule built around one specific creative concept and one specific date. It is a rollout structure that gives fans and press multiple points of engagement rather than a single announcement that risks fading from attention within a news cycle.

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APEE’s positioning inside the wider A Bathing Ape portfolio has always been a little distinct from the brand’s core identity. Where the flagship men’s line trades heavily on nostalgia (Nigo’s original camo, the ape head logo, decades of hip hop adjacent cultural capital) APEE has had to build its own audience relationship largely from scratch, aimed at a demographic that may know A Bathing Ape by reputation more than by direct memory of its 2000s peak.

Tying that effort to an actively touring, actively promoting girl group with a large and online engaged fanbase is a reasonably direct way to solve that problem. BABYMONSTER’s fandom infrastructure, built through YG Entertainment’s usual apparatus of Weverse, dedicated fan cafes, and heavy short form video promotion, gives APEE a built in audience that does not require the brand to generate its own hype cycle from nothing. The horn motif, small as it is, functions as a signal to that audience specifically: it is not a generic streetwear graphic, it is a piece of the group’s own visual shorthand, transplanted onto a garment.