The Worm Logo That Ate Tokyo
Two friends of mine were wandering through Shibuya when they started noticing it—white NASA shirts, everywhere, on everyone. Same story in Harajuku, same story in Shimokitazawa. By the time they messaged me about it, the thing had already metastasized into something you couldn’t unsee.
The NASA "worm" logo—that sleek, retro-futurist wordmark the agency had retired in 1992—had become the graphic of the summer. The pieces making noise were collaborations between Heron Preston, Monkey Time, Vans, and Carhartt WIP: large white fields, clean logo placement, minimal fuss. The kind of thing that looks obvious in retrospect and impossible to predict in advance.
What makes it work isn’t the brands—it’s the timing. The ISS is back in the news cycle. Elon Musk talks about Mars like it’s a commute. Space feels less like Cold War nostalgia and more like an actual looming thing, and the worm logo sits right at that junction between institutional gravitas and pure graphic simplicity. Sometimes a trend arrives because the culture was ready for it, and this was that.