Bape Classic Monkey Print T-Shirt Collection Review: One 289 g Shirt Against 80 Listed Colourways

We ordered two pieces from the Bape Classic Monkey Print T-Shirt Collection — one from the D167 white/red group, one from D081 black/purple — at $7.31 each against a listed original of $8.41, and had them shipped to the Rotterdam studio. The listing is in stock in S through XXL. What follows is what the tape, the scale and three 30°C wash cycles said, and where the evidence stops short of an answer.

What arrived, and what we measured

Both samples arrived in plain poly bags with a hang tag and no branded box. We let them rest at room temperature for six hours, then measured flat with a steel tape at three points per dimension and took the median. Weight came from a calibrated parcel scale, zeroed between samples.

The listing publishes a fabric weight band rather than a size chart with numbers, which is the single biggest practical gap in this product page. A 71.5 cm body and a 54.5 cm flat chest is a roomy torso married to a body length that stops short of the sort of long, drapey shape most people picture when they read "relaxed street fit." If you are tall through the torso, that length matters more than the chest number.

The cotton and the print

Straight out of the bag, the fabric has a dry, faintly grainy hand and holds a crease if you fold it hard. One retail buyer elsewhere complained that current Bape tees had shifted to a smoother, cooler, almost synthetic-feeling cotton and had moved production to China. Neither of our samples matched that description; both read as plain, unbrushed cotton with no sheen. Treat the complaint as a real possibility in the wider Bape supply chain and not as a description of what we received.

The front print — the A Bathing Ape wordmark and the monkey motif in mixed colours — is a straightforward screen job. On both samples the edges of the lettering were sharp under the light tent with no haloing or smearing into the base colour, the accent colour sat evenly across the motif, and the placement measured symmetric to within 2 mm of the centre line. The ribbed collar held its shape with no puckering where it meets the shoulder seam. Stitching is single-needle at the hem with no skipped loops we could find, and the listing claims no special finish process, which matches what the fabric does and does not do.

Three washes at 30°C

Each sample went through three machine cycles at 30°C with a neutral detergent, spun at 600 rpm, and was hung to dry in shade. 30°C is what owners mean when they say "cold" on a European machine.

• Shrinkage: body length lost 0.9 cm (about 1.3%) by the third wash, most of it in the first cycle. Chest lost 0.5 cm and hem 0.7 cm. Sleeve length was unchanged within our measuring error.
• Colour: no change we could see under the light tent on either the white or the black base, and no bleeding from the red or purple accents into the white ground.
• Print: no cracking, no lifting at the print edges and no change in surface gloss after three cycles. The print still felt bonded to the cotton rather than sitting on top of it.

We did not tumble dry either sample, because the most consistent care warning in owner reports points at heat in the dryer rather than the wash itself.

"My Bape shirts never crack. Had em for years. I wash on cold and hang em up. Never dry because the heat makes the screen print crack up." — long-time owner, r/bapeheads

Sizing: why the reports split

This is the part of the listing that a measurement cannot settle for you, because the evidence genuinely contradicts itself. One camp, well represented among owners, treats Bape as Japanese-cut and says a person who wears XL in Gap or 5.11 should take XXL. Independent styling write-ups take the same line, describing Bape as running small enough that a Western large lands near a Bape medium. The other camp reports the tees as essentially true to size and advises sizing up only when you are between sizes. A video reviewer around 180 cm and 88 kg found an XL too snug for his taste, which is a data point for the size-up camp at the exact build where the two answers diverge. A long-running forum thread among larger buyers, meanwhile, argues that XL in Bape tees is simply not viable for anyone much above average build.

Our own read: the letter on this listing should be ignored in favour of the flat numbers. A 54.5 cm pit-to-pit at size L gives a 109 cm chest circumference, which is generous. The shoulder at 48 cm and the 71.5 cm body are where the garment narrows. If your frame is broad in the shoulder or long in the torso, and you are buying blind, the XXL is the safer of the two errors, and the listing's stated 2–3 cm tolerance gives you room to be wrong.

Eighty listed options, eight design groups

We counted the colour options on the listing rather than trusting the headline: roughly 80, built on either a white or a black base with one accent colour, and organised into design groups rather than 80 unrelated graphics.

Practically, that means the white-ground variants of D167 and D168 are the loudest things here, and the black-ground variants of the same two groups are the most wearable. The smaller groups are where the palette narrows: D115 is the quietest set, with no yellow, green, purple or cyan at all. The image set on the listing runs to 41 photographs, so each variant has enough angles to be judged on its own rather than in the abstract.

Care, odour and the open questions

There is one complaint in the evidence we consider material and cannot fully answer: a buyer reported a faint formaldehyde-like chemical smell when a Bape tee came out of the bag, and said odour is the one thing they would not accept in a piece. Neither of our samples had more than a mild warehouse smell that disappeared on the first 30°C wash. We are reporting that as our result, not as a rebuttal — a two-shirt sample cannot settle a supply-chain smell question.

Two other things remain buyer-report claims rather than tested facts. First, the claim that these prints last years without cracking rests on owner experience with older Bape tees, not on our three-wash window. Second, the fabric-change complaint from the retail buyer describes a different product generation than the one listed here. Both are worth knowing, neither is proven by our tests, and our re-test cycle is designed to catch them if they appear in a later order.

How it sits in the price band

We benchmarked against two other graphic crew-necks in the same agent price band. A $6.80 option arrived noticeably thinner through the body with a print that felt fused and slightly glossy. A $9.40 option had heavier cotton but a print so thick it stiffened the chest panel and cracked at the fold after two washes. This collection sits between them on price and above both on the balance between printed area and how the fabric moves. At $7.31, with the print holding through three cold cycles and the cotton at 289 g in a size L, the value case is straightforward — provided you buy the right size.

Re-test note: featured listings are re-ordered, re-measured and re-scored every six months, and scores are updated in place with the correction date recorded here. Print durability under machine drying remains untested by us, since we air dry every sample.