Bangkok (Lonely Planet) - Andrew Burke [18]
Artist and writer Steven Pettifor is the author of the book Flavours – Thai Contemporary Art, and is also the editor of the Bangkok Art Map (BAM!).
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Fashion shows grace the lobbies of various shopping centres around the city practically every weekend of the year. Since 1999 one of the biggest annual events has been Bangkok Fashion Week, a string of fashion shows in various venues around the city, including the new Fashion Dome, an air dome constructed over the middle of the lake at Benjakitti Park, adjacent to the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. The Bangkok International Fashion Fair, held in September, is mostly a trade event but weekend days are usually open to the public.
The Thai government’s clumsily named Office of the Bangkok Fashion City promotes fashion events and aims to turn Bangkok into a world-class – rather than simply regional – fashion centre by 2012. The office, however, has clashed more than once with Thailand’s culture minister, who regularly chastises the organisers of Bangkok Fashion Week for the skimpiness of some of the outfits displayed on the catwalks. Coupled with the conservative night-time entertainment-venue closing times, such puritanism leads many in Bangkok’s fashion community to question whether the city can attain world-class status with such government interference.
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ARCHITECTURE
Temples, Forts & Shophouses
When Bangkok became the capital of the kingdom of Siam in 1782, the first task set before designers of the new city was to create hallowed ground for royal palaces and Buddhist monasteries. Indian astrologers and high-ranking Buddhist monks conferred to select and consecrate the most auspicious riverside locations, marking them off with small carved stone pillars. Siam’s most talented architects and artisans then weighed in, creating majestic and ornate edifices designed to astound all who ventured into the new capital.
The temples and palaces along the riverbanks of Mae Nam Chao Phraya transformed humble Bang Makok into the glitter and glory of Ko Ratanakosin (Ratanakosin Island), and their scale and intricacy continue to make a lasting impression on new arrivals. Whether approaching by river or by road, from a distance your eye is instantly caught by the sunlight refracting off the multitude of gilded spires peeking over the huge walls of Wat Phra Kaew, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Inside the brick-and-stucco walls, you can easily lose yourself amid the million-sq-metre grounds, which bring together more than 100 buildings and about two centuries of royal history and architectural experimentation.
Early Bangkok was both a citadel and a city of temples and palaces. Today the massive whitewashed walls of Phra Sumen Fort, punctured by tiny windows and topped with neat crenulations, still loom over the northern end of trendy Th Phra Athit, facing Mae Nam Chao Phraya. On the other side of the battlements, Khlong Banglamphu (Banglamphu Canal) cuts away from the river at a sharp angle, creating the northern tip of Ko Ratanakosin, a man-made ‘island’ out of the left bank of the river. Erected in 1783 and named for the mythical Mt Meru (Phra Sumen in Thai) of Hindu-Buddhist cosmology, the octagonal brick-and-stucco bunker was one of 14 city fortresses built along Khlong Banglamphu. Of the 4m-high, 3m-thick ramparts that once lined the entire canal, only Phra Sumen and Mahakan have been preserved to show what 18th-century Bangkok was really about – keeping foreign armies at bay.
Open trade with the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Chinese made the fortifications obsolete by the mid-19th century, and most of the original city wall was demolished to make way for