November 20, 2005

To Be Young and Hip in Bangkok

By MATT GROSS

TO the untrained eye, the Au Bon Pain at J Avenue, a strip mall on Soi Thonglor in Bangkok, doesn't look like much. On a recent evening, a group of university students in jeans and studded belts were "studying" their textbooks and showing off their new cellphones. At another table, four office types were examining floor plans. A mother brought her children in for snacks. A young woman quietly smoked a cigarette.

It could have been any Au Bon Pain in any minimall in any city on the planet. But this wasn't just another fast-food franchise. This was, according to Krissanaphong Kiattisak, the epicenter of creativity in Bangkok.

And Kris, as everyone calls him, should know better than perhaps anyone in this city of 5.6 million people: He is the editor in chief of Wallpaper* Thailand, the new spinoff of the international design bible (and only the second foreign franchise, after Russia), and this cafe - a wide-open place that feeds the see-and-be-seen desires of hip residents - has become something of a second office to him and his staff.

"You can sit here all day and talk to photographers and stylists," said Mr. Krissanaphong, a former architect and interior designer whose response to the city's overwhelming heat that day was to wear a blue-and-gray striped sweater.

Just then, a group of young men with stylish black glasses sat down outside and waved through the plate-glass window at Mr. Krissanaphong and his creative director, Nontawat (Moo) Charoenchasri, and editorial coordinator, Chidlada (Louise) Chananon.

"We know everybody," Mr. Krissanaphong said, smiling.

These days in Bangkok, "everybody" is a significantly larger group than it once was. The people you meet at parties, clubs and cafes seem to be graphic designers, or architects, or fashion photographers, or producers of TV commercials and short films. (Or they give parties for those people.) What's more, their influence is starting to be felt far beyond the borders of Thailand.

Art films by the directors Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are winning acclaim and awards at international festivals, while Tony Jaa, an action star, is being touted as "the next Jackie Chan" for his balletic stunts in films like "Ong Bak." Thai advertising is considered the most innovative in Asia, with the TV-commercial directors Suthon Petchsuwan and Thanonchai Sornsrivichai and the production company Phenomena in the top rankings of the 2005 Gunn Report, an industry guide that tracks advertising awards.

Architecture and interior design, too, have come a long way from the mid-90's, when a skyscraper that was built to look like - no joke - a white elephant was the most famous (or infamous) mark on Bangkok's skyline. Now a new, subtler generation of architects has come to the fore, and at least half a dozen Thai-language interior-design magazines can easily be found on newsstand shelves. (Not Wallpaper*, however. The first issue of the monthly sold out a few weeks after its September release.)

And aspiring decorators no longer have to import housewares from Italy or looted antiquities from Cambodian temples. Thai companies like Propaganda are establishing themselves as equals to Alessi, and their reliably whimsical products are finding a market through smaller New York shops like the Reed Space, on the Lower East Side.

But the heart of all this innovation remains Bangkok, and Soi Thonglor in particular. (Sois are the numbered alleys branching off Bangkok's main streets. Most are narrow, but some, like Thonglor, which is technically Sukhumvit Soi 55, are long and wide enough to be main streets themselves.) Leave J Avenue to explore Thonglor, and you'll be assaulted not by Bangkok traffic (improving - slowly - thanks to the SkyTrain and subway) but by innumerable design showrooms advertising such brands as Flos, Cappellini and Kartell.

At one end of Thonglor, you'll hit Sukhumvit Road, which is lined with Bangkok's most upmarket malls, and at the other you'll discover H1, a modest but sleek collection of businesses - an ice-cream parlor, two restaurants, a club, an art-book store and a furniture showroom - clustered around two relatively serene courtyards. In between these points are more shopping centers frequented by both expats and wealthy Thais, as well as hip pubs like Escudo and Red Bar and, down the labyrinth of alleyways that connect Soi Thonglor and Sukhumvit Road, some of Bangkok's most expensive residential real estate.

"A year ago, it was nothing but wedding shops, but now it's grown into a fashion extravaganza," says Joshua Phillips, a 23-year-old American with wild blond hair who runs the comprehensive shopping-and-night-life Web site BangkokRecorder.com. "Will it be a success? Yes. Because condos are ridiculously expensive, so Hi-So types" - high-society, that is - "are moving into the area. And where will they spend money?"

The most recent answer to that urgent question is a three-story black-slate minimall called Playground! Open since late March, Playground! is, according to its developer, the real-estate mogul Thongchai Busrapan, Thailand's first "concept store," modeled after shops like Colette, in Paris, where a selective collection of high-end housewares, clothing, CD's and art books are displayed side by side (some would say willy-nilly).

At Playground!, on the shelves and racks surrounding a sun-filled atrium, which houses an enormous Snoopy-style doghouse tagged by Thailand's top graffiti writers, you find Mandarina Duck luggage and rebuilt jeans by the Thai label Medium-Rare, Pantone notebooks and dangly ethnic necklaces from Kit-Ti's Jewelry. The top floor has two restaurants (one of which, Kuppa, serves spaghetti with Thai anchovies, apparently the standard of cool cuisine), an art gallery (now featuring the work of Yayoi Kusama) and an auditorium.

The ground floor has what may be Bangkok's biggest selection of international magazines, along with a music shop where you can pick up a concept-store essential: the Playground! signature CD, a Buddha Bar-like D.J. mix. And, of course, there's a Starbucks, which, like the Au Bon Pain, attracts architects and graphic designers, who discuss blueprints and branding over pricey Frappuccinos.

Playground! and Soi Thonglor are only the most obvious evidence of Bangkok's new attention to design and creativity. The bars and clubs at RCA (Royal City Avenue) have undergone a makeover, transforming themselves from dark and cheap rooms into lively, raucous and self-consciously designed spaces - and thereby recapturing the popularity they enjoyed in the mid-90's.

RCA is also home to the House, a wood-paneled cinema that shows indie and art films from around the world but available nowhere else in Thailand. (The renewed interest in film is so widespread that even at Chatuchak, the vast weekend market, there is a stall selling short Thai films.)

Likewise, Siam Square, a dense warren of boutiques, cafes and salons on Sukhumvit Road, is coming into its own, with an invigorating mix of fashions ranging from chic to disposable. It's like a huge H&M, with teenagers flitting from tiny shop to tiny shop, and older trend spotters (including the Wallpaper* crew) lurking in the background, carefully observing every purchase.

"It's very Shibuya," said Pim Sukhahuta, a Bangkok-based fashion designer who led me around Siam Square one afternoon, referring to one of Tokyo's liveliest shopping and entertainment districts. "There are a lot of places hanging off the trends." Her young face stiffened as she inspected store windows for rip-offs of the poofy dresses she sells under the label Sretsis. (Her flagship store was expected to reopen last week in the high-end Gaysorn Plaza mall, and you can preview her designs at TG-170 and Albertine in New York, and at Milk in Los Angeles.)

But Bangkok's creative revolution is not being fought solely in shopping centers. In market areas, you're likely to find as many brightly colored cafes as dingy but excellent noodle stalls. (There are now almost enough espresso machines in Bangkok to justify its old nickname: Venice of the East.) And up on the 24th floor of the Emporium Towers, off Sukhumvit Road, you may run into a team of architects, curators, graphic designers and the occasional former MTV V.J., at the Thailand Creative and Design Center, a combination library-cafe-office that they hope will become, after its expected opening last Tuesday, a hangout for Bangkok's creative class.

It was Paravi Wongchirachai, the design center's "knowledge and curatorial director," who assuaged my concern that, well, maybe all this development is just rampant Westernization. As Mr. Paravi explained it, Thais have been incorporating foreign cultures for centuries.

In architecture, what we see as traditionally Thai - the royal palace, for example - is actually 14th-century Khmer style reworked by 19th-century Italian craftsmen. Even something as seemingly essential to Thai culture as the chili pepper is, after all, a New World import. The recent emphasis on design and beauty, many people told me, has a homegrown catalyst: the economic crisis of 1997-98, which devalued the baht, making it more difficult for young people to study abroad, raising the price of foreign products and clearing away an older generation of creative professionals.

My theory, however, is that the current wave of hyperconscious aestheticism is a subconscious reaction to the dirty, damp, often wonderful ugliness of Bangkok's streets. At the end of Sukhumvit Soi 11, for example, you will run into what looks like a gleaming white U.F.O. on stilts. Walk up its boarding ramp, though, and - assuming the doorman lets you in - you'll discover the Bed Supperclub, whose well-dressed, well-heeled patrons recline on white mattresses and munch on Asian-Mediterranean cuisine while an international cast of D.J.'s spin house music in the adjacent bar. It is the standard of hipness in Bangkok - and it doesn't even serve spaghetti with Thai anchovies.

Bed's opening three years ago is widely seen as the beginning of the current epidemic of Thai innovation. Whether Bed was its germ or simply the first symptom is up for debate, but the restaurant is now finding itself at the forefront of another trend: Bangkok as the place to establish yourself internationally.

Bed Supperclub was spun off from Miami's B.E.D., and now Bangkok is home to the exclusive, celebrity-stuffed Japanese restaurant Koi, which originated in Los Angeles and recently opened a branch in New York. When the Creative and Design Center opens, it will offer access to Material ConneXion, a library of design and construction materials so far available only in New York, Cologne and Milan.

"A lot of the Hollywood fashion themes that are really in in New York and Hollywood amazingly come to Thailand first," Tata Young, a Thai-American pop star, told me in the offices of her label, Sony BMG.

She brandished a blue leather Balenciaga bag that she claimed was unavailable anywhere but Bangkok. "I was traveling between Thailand and Japan, and a lot of the stuff - bags and shoes - they don't even carry it in Japan, but you can find it in Thailand," she said.

Balenciaga notwithstanding, there remain certain things that you can't find in Thailand. For instance: bars that stay open late.

"It's not as fun as it used to be, since everything closes at 1 now," lamented Masiri (Amp) Tamsakul, a senior stylist at the Thai edition of Marie Claire.

Since last March, most Bangkok bars and clubs have been required by law to shut at 1 a.m., a measure the government says will curb youth drug and alcohol abuse, and improve Thailand's image. More cynical observers complain that Bangkok's movers and shakers, whose children are rumored to be among the more notorious clubgoers, are simply shunting their parental responsibilities over to night-life entrepreneurs.

In response, Ms. Masiri said: "People tend to hang out at their private party places. They tend to party in their friends' place because they can stay all night long. It used to be a lot crazier than it is now."

Similarly, the Thai music scene is underdeveloped. Tata is about the only local pop singer to have achieved a measure of stardom abroad (mostly in Asia), possibly because the rest of the mainstream is populated with interchangeably sweet boys and girls.

"The music scene is really quite cheesy," said Pongsuang (Note) Kunprasop, a wiry, sarcastic 25-year-old who runs the popular "Dude Sweet" series of parties (hipness quotient: He played host to the October launch party for the new Franz Ferdinand album). "We have something called 'rock bands,' but they just dress like rock stars. They're really Thai pop."

Mr. Pongsuang was perhaps being a little harsh. Bangkok does have a thriving indie scene. Such labels as Small Room and Panda Records are cultivating a mix of rock, punk, lounge and electronica that caters to a subculture known as dek naew - essentially the Bangkok version of Williamsburg's ballyhooed hipsters, with an innocent vitality that mitigates all that posturing. Mr. Pongsuang himself likes the band Futon, which he calls a mix of the Scissor Sisters and Fischerspooner, with an Elton John-like singer.

The thing is, it's hard to find a place to see any of them live. Eastbound-downers.com and Thaipoppers.com publish late-breaking announcements of club dates, but if you hear Sek Loso or Modern Dog, it will most likely be on Fat Radio, or on CD's bought at DJ Siam, in Siam Square; Playground!; or Comfort Zone, in the Siam Discovery Center mall, which buys music for Playground!

Another problem hampering Bangkok's creative development is the population's addiction to fads. Ms. Pim, the Sretsis designer, almost refuses to shop in either Siam Square or the malls because of how slavishly both designers and consumers follow the latest trends. She now either wears her own clothes or cruises the used-clothing piles inside Wat Suan Kaew, which she refers to as "the one-baht temple" for its ultra-low prices.

Even some of the hippest places on Soi Thonglor have trouble maintaining their appeal. Playground! occasionally borders on empty, whether because its prices are too high or its selection too odd (does Bangkok really need Ikea leftovers?). At H1, one of the restaurants, Extase, recently moved out, supposedly to a new location on Thonglor. Even so, an H2 is already in the works, and will probably render its predecessor obsolete.

No one I spoke with could quite agree on the life cycle of a bar or boutique, but it was never more than four years, and usually closer to two.

The most radical verdict was issued by Vitoon Kunalangkarn, director of the IAW Company, the architecture firm responsible for Playground!, H1, the Greyhound Cafes and a new conceptual shopping center being developed at the Sukhumvit end of Soi Thonglor.

"It's not more than one year," he said. "Trendiness, it's a bad habit of the Thai people."

At the same time, that trendiness means something new and cool is always just over the horizon. And right now, the sun is starting to crack on Soi Ari, an aging neighborhood of 70's-era quasi-fascist architecture. Soi Ari floods easily, and it sits almost at the end of one of the SkyTrain lines, but it is also home to the highest concentration of creative types I encountered.

Members of Futon live there, along with a host of foreign fashion models. In one otherwise unremarkable apartment block, I met an art/fashion photographer; a Japanese man organizing a music festival, and his girlfriend, the owner of Panda Records; and two curators - and this was all after midnight.

Soi Ari also has what may turn out to be - more than Playground! - the emblem of creative Bangkok: Reflections, a bright pink hotel whose 28 rooms reflect the whims of individual artists brought in to design them. There is the Lazy-Day Room (No. 404), which replicates a beach bungalow in the city - sand, coconut trees and all - and Post Industrial (No. 402), a Hollywood-via-Thailand vision of New York loft living, circa 1981.

"Trust me, in five years, it's going to be a hip area," said Mr. Pongsuang , who happens to live in the neighborhood and loves the way its crumbling infrastructure preserves its indie credibility.

At least for now. One night, after a dinner at Reflections, during which the pounding rain flooded the hotel lobby, he examined his own place near the top of the Bangkok hipness hierarchy and admitted, "Indie is just one process of the mainstream."

All of which is to say, whether you're on Thonglor or on Ari, into Tata or into Futon, hungry for Bed or hungry for pad kee mao, the Bangkok you see right now is one you should commit to memory. Because in a year or two, it may be replaced by an entirely different one.

?

IF YOU GO

Getting There

The fastest route to Bangkok is on Thai Airways' four-times-a-week nonstop flights from Kennedy Airport (six times a week in summer) - if you can handle 17 hours in the air. Round-trip tickets start at around $860 (depending on time of year), but you can upgrade to premium economy - wider seats, more leg room, better meal selection - for an extra $199 each way if you buy a ticket before Dec. 10 (after that, premium economy tickets start at $3,320). Information: www.thaiairways.com.

Getting Around

Avoid haggling with tuk-tuk drivers, and take a taxi (starting at 35 baht, about 85 cents, for the first kilometer or so, with an average fare of less than 100 baht, or $2.40), or use the SkyTrain and subway, which run until midnight. Day passes for the SkyTrain are $2.50, for the subway $3, at 42 baht to $1.

Where to Stay

The Metropolitan, 27 South Sathorn Road, (66-2) 625-3333, metropolitan.como.bz, is the chicest boutique hotel in town, with staff members dressed in Yohji Yamamoto uniforms, yoga mats in every room, and the Met Bar. Doubles begin at $240.

Cheaper and quirkier - but a little out of the way - is Reflections, 81 Soi Ari, Phaholyothin 7 Road, (66-2) 270-3344, www.reflections-thai.com, each of whose 28 rooms is designed by a different artist. Rates from $51 (2,050 baht).

Where to Shop

In the Thonglor area, Playground! has fashion, jewelry and furnishings by small and large Thai labels, with plenty of international brands mixed in; (66-2) 714-9616; 946/4 Soi Thonglor; www.playgroundstore.co.th.

Nearby is H1, where art directors browse the enormous catalog at Basheer Design Books; 988/7 Soi Thonglor; (66-2) 391-9815; basheergraphic.com.

Siam Square can be tough to navigate, so keep these destinations in mind: Issue, for hipster fashions that channel Nepal, 266/10 Siam Square Soi 3, (66-2) 658-4416); It's Happened to Be a Closet, for bright faux-vintage womenswear, 266/3 Siam Square, Soi 3, (66-2) 658-4696; and DJ Siam, for innovative Thai rock/lounge/hip-hop/punk/whatever on CD; 292/16 Siam Square Soi 4; (66-2) 251-2513.

Pim Sukhahuta's carousel-themed Sretsis store was set to open last week at Gaysorn Plaza, 2F-28, 999 Ploenchit Road; (66-2) 656-1125; sretsis.com.

Siam Center, meanwhile, has branches of Greyhound (Thailand's French Connection), Jaspal (Thailand's Gap) and Fly Now (Thailand's Scoop).

Until Siam Paragon opens, Emporium is the most chichi mall, with a Prada boutique you can skip and a Propaganda home-furnishings store you can't - for popular items like Mr. P lamps and the "shark fin" fruit bowl; 622 Sukhumvit Soi 24, fourth floor; www.propagandaonline.com.

Where to Eat

For Thai food served in a glamorous setting, Spring and Summer, 199 Soi Promsri 2, Sukhumvit soi 39, (66-2) 392-2747, in a pair of 1950's houses not far from Soi Thonglor, passes muster with crunchy-fresh spring rolls and surprisingly creamy braised scallops with sweet onions and chili oil. A meal for two with drinks comes to about 2,000 baht.

Le Lys, 75/2 Langsuan Soi 3, (66-2) 652-2401, [email protected], has a French country cafe feel and baby clams you can't leave without tasting. A meal for two with drinks, 2,000 baht.

Greyhound Cafes are where stylish mallgoers lunch (about 400 baht a person); you can find them at Emporium, Central Chidlom and J Avenue.

In the Soi Ari area, the restaurant at Reflections is excellent (try the sweet raw shrimp with chili sauce, or the pork-neck salad), with a meal for two about 1,000 baht. And Pla Dib, Soi Areesamphan 7, (66-2) 279-818, a Thai-Japanese restaurant with clean lines and a peaceful garden, features inventive fusion dishes like a roast duck and pomelo salad with mint and chilies, and tuna sashimi with a spicy dry rub; about 1,200 baht for two.

But to eat like a local, the street is still the place. Every night on Sukhumvit Soi 38, at the foot of Soi Thonglor, scores of vendors sell delicious fare. You will have a hard time spending more than 200 baht.

Where to Drink

Since most bars and clubs must close at 1 a.m., there is not much time to party. If you can't get dinner reservations at Bed Supperclub - and you probably won't - pop by for a drink and to gawk; 26 Sukhumvit Soi 11; (66-2) 651-3537; online at

bedsupperclub.com. A glass of wine is 250 baht.

There is very likely a Dude Sweet event somewhere; check dudesweet.org for details. You can find out which bands are playing where by visiting eastbound-downers.com or thaipoppers.com.

If you need to dance, Astra is the current anchor of the RCA club scene; 29/53-64 Soi Soonvijai, Rama 9 Road, (66-9) 497-8422; club-astra.com.

For an unusual retro-Thai experience, there is 70's Bar, with uncannily familiar disco from that decade; 231/16 Soi Sarasin, (66-2) 253-4433; 70sbar.com.

And around midnight, the boys at Freeman put on a nightly drag spectacular that's so over-the-top and full of heart you may tear up when the clock finally chimes 1; 60/18-21 Silom Road, (66-2) 632-8033).

MATT GROSS is working on a book about border towns around the world and a novel about 1950's Cambodia.

this must be longest journal ;D