ARTICLES : THEMAGAZINE issue 9

Fallen Finial, Rumoh Rajo

Out of the Shadows A new book and exhibition sheds light on the hidden cultural heritage of Thailand’s Deep South. by philip cornwel-smith / photographs by xavier comas ost civilisations are a motif of Southeast Asia. Angkor, Sukhothai, Borobudur, Bagan – their ruins have resurfaced from the jungle as trophies of heritage and as props for posing beside like Indiana Jones. These enigmatic cultures endured due to their size and fabled past, but also because they were built in stone. As Malays built in wood, few of their monuments remain. So a new book about a forgotten teak mansion in Narathiwat – House of the Raja: Splendour and Desolation in Thailand’s Deep South – offers a rare window on one of ASEAN’s oldest civilisations, now all but obliterated.

Xavier Comas, a Catalan photographer based in Bangkok, chanced upon this decaying house while exploring the Deep South. He didn’t yet realise what the building meant – to himself, to the local people or to history. Comas befriended the inhabitants of what’s called the Rumoh Rajo, a bomoh (Muslim shaman) and his family, who invited him to stay there for several months over more than a year. The house became his obsession, and ultimately, a revelation.

“What started as a photo project ended up being a story,” says Comas, his boundless energy unflagging after ten days poring over

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Rumoh Rajo's attic

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proofs. He had showed some of the monochrome images from his first two sojourns there at H Gallery, Bangkok, in 2011. During that show, a Malay swathed in batik danced traditional mak yong, in a glimmer of the missing heritage that the photographs mourn. Turning it into a book soon took over Comas’s life. “People at the exhibition were curious, asking me lots of questions, but it was a mystery. So I wanted to find out about what happened there in the past, the reasons I was so infatuated.”

Cycling around a land left in limbo, Comas became rapt by its enigmas: shamanic healing rites, mutterings about the invisible society of djinn spirits, recollections by descendants of a Raja who’d lived in the Rumoh Rajo, and the disappearance of artefacts from the house. To turn his anecdotes into a text, he consulted the Thai novelist Tew Bunnag, who wrote the foreword.

Comas had to turn himself into

an author, showing lyrical skill in a second language. Through transporting turns-of-phrase, he retells the psychological drama of his immersion into this hidden world.

“The shadows are like another character. They inhabit the house,” says Comas, recounting tales of spirits that served the Rajas for hundreds of years. The absence of light in the Rumoh Rajo also confronted his own childhood fears of the dark. Hence he shot in black and white. His design language for the book incorporates those shadows, with stairways that fade into deep black ink. You don’t see the paper – except in the middle, where the text forms a book-within-a-book. The first flow of images conjures curiosity in the reader. The second set, enlightened by the text, is more introspective; you can identify the characters and feel the intensity.

This duality reflects Comas’ impression of the house. “The

shadows are about memory, about past, something obscured.

The light is more present about what’s going on now.” Together, the images, text and design convey a little-known culture at risk of total eclipse.

The ancient civilisations of the peninsula – Langkasuka and later Patani – barely register in the Bangkok mind. Aside from fear of the separatist violence, there is a cultural disconnect.

The different religion and language present hurdles. Patani (originally spelled with one T) predated Malaka as a centre of Islamic scholarship, and its people still speak a dialect of Malay that’s written in Arabic and called Jawi. The region lost not just its monuments, but also most of what UNESCO calls the “intangible heritage” to which outsiders might relate: traditions, textiles, dance, festivals, rituals, libraries, heirlooms, history. It’s a loss of cultural memory.

Few even in the Deep South can now relate this house to its

original owner, the last Raja of Legeh. The place names in the three chapter titles seem detached from present reality, like some Ruritanian duchy on an old map of Europe. “The Secrets of Bang Nara” refers to a former name of Narathiwat, where Comas discovers the house on his initial cool-season visit. “The Spell of Langkasuka” alludes to the depth of history that emerged when Comas stayed in the house on his second sojourn. Predating Sukhothai, Patani had been a cosmopolitan entrepôt visited by the navigators Cheng Ho, Ibn Battuta and, some claim, Marco Polo. Before Patani, before Islam came, before the Srivijaya Empire, this region was Langkasuka, a Hindu realm known to the Romans. Finally, in “Storms over Legeh,” Comas recounts his third, rainy-season stay, in which he learns the last Raja’s fate.

Long a tributary state of Siam, Patani was formally annexed in a 1909 treaty with the British

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The South is instantly identified with fear.

But fear comes from ignorance. One way to overcome that is through personal experience, to go there yourself.

Fatimah

Empire. The northern Malay States became a British colony, and Patani’s seven principalities, each ruled by a Raja, were reorganised into Monthon Pattani region and later into Thai provinces. Many local names were Siamised: Legeh to Rangae, Singora to Songkhla, Patani to Pattani. Somehow this house survived the change.

One of Comas’s finds, in a village school, was an 800-yearold leather Koran – one of very few in existence from Al Andalus, the Moorish caliphate in what’s now southern Spain.

Having an Andalusian mother, Comas ponders the parallels between his own journey and those of Andalusia and Pattani.

Currently poor, both regions romanticise their past wealth, sophistication and tolerance.

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Both were maritime ports and peninsula borderlands that linked Islam with, respectively, the Christian and Buddhist worlds.

“It’s sad to think that while Al Andalus lives on in its palaces like the Alhambra, Pattani lives only in its memories.”

Other links kept surfacing.

Tew Bunnag descends directly from the governor who integrated Pattani into Siam under the reign of King Rama V, who is the great-grandfather of the book’s publisher and editor, M.R. Narisa Chakrabongse.

Comas kept meeting locals who’d visited the Rumoh Rajo long ago without realising its history. “The people I met, and everything that happened, all fell into place perfectly – as if in a fairytale. I’m super-sceptical, not superstitious, but I felt that that story had been

written already. You could call it fate, or that the house somehow called me.”

Many wonder why Comas first went to such a forsaken place.

“The South is instantly identified with fear. But fear comes from ignorance,” Comas points out.

“One way to overcome that is through personal experience, to go there yourself. I wanted to know what was going on beyond the conflict, about the people and the culture.”

Such derring-do comes naturally to Comas, 43, who approaches life as an aesthetic adventure. Burly and excitable, he combines the eye of an artist with the daredevil zest of Bear Grylls. “Maybe I’m a dreamer, a bit naïve in that sense, about going to remote places,” he says.

Bored with Spain, he undertook

The Climbing Wall

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The Raja's well

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The House of the Raja works on multiple levels: memoir, travelogue, mystery, and elegy – as well as a portfolio of sparse, haunting beauty.

raw exploration, mostly solo, often for weeks in the wild.

Comas had a canoe built so he could paddle from Palawan to Borneo. He trekked the Australian outback, motorcycled remotest Cambodia, traversed a jungle island in Micronesia, and roamed through forest to tribal villages in the Philippines, Indonesia, Laos, West Papua and Shan State, Myanmar. “It was sometimes risky, but also exciting, and an exploration of my own fears and thoughts. I would just stop at a fishing village, ask to rent a boat, get some food, and then go upstream – that kind of thing.

I was fascinated that I would never know what would happen, or where I was going. It was such a liberation.”

Looking for a new challenge, Comas realised something hidden in plain sight. “I never thought I could do this kind of adventure in a country so popular with tourists, yet within Thailand there exists someplace forgotten and mysterious. I found it

interesting that people were terrified of going to this region and knew so little about it.”

That situation can only improve. “I hope the book can encourage more empathy and solidarity with the people there, who at the end of the day are Thai citizens,” Comas says. “If you talk to people who live here, you will get a totally different perspective.

So I think this book is a positive contribution.”

The House of the Raja works on multiple levels: memoir, travelogue, mystery, and elegy – as well as a portfolio of sparse, haunting beauty.

“It doesn’t pretend to be a historical document. I’m not an academic, I’m not a journalist,” says Comas. Though he travels without a preconceived idea, he later researched missing pieces of the jigsaw. So his tale feels like a mythic journey in which the protagonist unpeels the meaning of his quest. “The most important aspect of the book for me – more valuable than the photographs – is

my personal experience and my connection with this place and the people I came to know.”

Near the end of his journey, the residents went away and asked Comas to take care of the house – alone. “I decided to say goodbye to the house in a ritualistic way,” Comas recalls. “I didn’t turn on the lights. I just entered and did this walkthrough in darkness. I went to the courtyard and had a bath at the well. Then I went upstairs to the attic and I sat down in the dark and I expressed my gratitude.”

House of the Raja: Splendour and Desolation in Thailand’s Deep South, by Xavier Comas, is published this month by River Books. Marking the launch is an exhibition of photography from the book at Eat Me! art restaurant until September 27th.

Comas will sign copies of his book there on September 6th and 20th from 3-6pm.

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Tailoring History How do you write the next chapter of a fashion fairytale? And without taking the shine off its already perfectly formed story arc? That, in a nutshell, is the tricky task facing Salvatore Ferragamo’s creative director, Massimiliano Giornetti, as he navigates the legendary shoe brand through the choppy waters of 21st-century fashion. by max crosbie-jones / photos courtesy of salvatore ferragamo

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here are few places on earth where history reverberates as strongly as it does in Florence. It echoes down the centuries through cobblestone streets. It lives in solemn marble statues and noisy leather workshops. It seeps from the cracks of stone bridges as old as Dante, soars through stairwells, and, in the high-ceilinged corridors of old palazzos, beams down at you from rows of Renaissance oil paintings. Everyone feels this – the weight of Florence’s rich artisanal history – but perhaps no one more so than Massimiliano Giornetti, the42-year-oldcreativedirector of legendary Italian shoe brand Salvatore Ferragamo, which was established here in 1928.

In those days, the label’s namesake founder was focused on shodding feet and, as he wrote in his autobiography, Shoemaker of Dreams, cracking the “secret that had eluded shoemakers for centuries – the secret of the shoes that would always fit.” But Massimiliano’s task is, in many ways, trickier.

Certainly it is more complex – season in, season out, he must create ready-to-wear collections for an old Italian fashion house with over 600 stores now scattered around the planet.

It is a delicate and highpressure job, especially because he must do it under the noses of the six members of the Ferragamo family who now helm the company, including Salvatore’s 93-year-old widow, Wanda, and their eldest son, Ferruccio. And then there is the remit: while his main task is to shape the company's future, the golden age of Ferragamo is not something they want him (and by extension us) to forget. As he puts it: “The Ferragamo archive is the core; it’s the life. Every time I start conceiving a new collection, everything starts from the archives.”

If the pressure of all this weighs heavily on Massimiliano – the pressure of balancing past and future each season, of making history while remaining faithful to it – he isn’t showing it. Not

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today, anyway, when we meet in a sumptuously furnished room of the Palazzo Spini Feroni, the Medieval Florentine castle that has served as the company’s headquarters since 1938. Smart, garrulous and genial, he exudes resolve and professionalism.

I start by asking him whether he finds it tricky creating fiercely modern clothes that somehow connect with the classics.

“Absolutely not,” is his poised reply. Working for a family company is a blessing, an opportunity to be relished – “a plus.”

And the archive stirs creativity rather than stymies it.

“The history of Salvatore Ferragamo,” he says, “is the history of glamour, of Hollywood, of creativity, passion, heart, joie de vivre, good taste, and also craftsmanship.

I have a lot of different spices to use in my recipes.”

Critics haven’t always been kind about Massimiliano’s “recipes.” Some find them too nostalgic, too earnestly reverent, too removed from what is happening elsewhere in Italian fashion. Others have criticised him for not being reverential enough. “The Salvatore Ferragamo creative director seems interested in stretching himself as a designer – flexing his intellectual chops with deconstructed suits on the one hand, and amping up the sex appeal with all sorts of midriff-revealing silhouettes on the other,” wrote Style.com’s Nicole Philips of his Spring 2014 women’s collection. “The issue is, neither of those new directions feels like such a natural fit for an Italian heritage label justly famous for its glamorous Hollywood affiliations and its bourgeois propriety.” But many more think that Massimiliano is like a pair of Salvatore's elegant shoes: a snug fit for the brand. As Sarah Mower from Vogue puts it: “He’s entered a house that was built on conservative shoes and taken it into a ready-to-wear proposition; a minimalist at heart who now commands shows on a large scale.” portrait by Dan Carabas

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The Ferragamo archive is the core; it’s the life.

Every time I start conceiving a new collection, everything starts from the archives.

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The history of Salvatore Ferragamo is the history of glamour, of Hollywood, of creativity, passion, heart, joie de vivre.

I have a lot of different spices to use in my recipes.

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In fairness, Massimiliano has simply been doing what he was entrusted to do – favouring slowly evolving designs over fickle trends while preserving the brand’s DNA and “Made in Italy” ethos. Plus, his tenure has coincided with a fruitful period for the company. Since 2010, when he was promoted from menswear, there have been successful brand extensions, and bigger profits bolstered by an audacious expansion drive into Asia. A formerly somewhat fusty label's hip quotient has also skyrocketed as celebs and consumers alike go wild for his designs (and rediscover the decades-old appeal of shoes like the Varina). While there have been setbacks, not least the economic slowdown, the general consensus is: so far, so good.

Never one to undersell his talents, Salvatore believed his shoe designs were preordained – Platonic ideals sent from shoe heaven. They arrived, he writes in his autobiography, “full-blown on the cosmic tide, all ancient errors smoothed away.” Massimiliano’s designs, in contrast, are born of soaking up the world around him, from looks spotted on streets to contemporary art.

Take his Fall/Winter 2014 ready-to-wear collection. Posted on Style.com’s “Split-Second Preview” column in February was a moodboard for it composed almost entirely of images of abstract and minimal contemporary art – fading paintings, evaporating colour spots, strong-lined forms, etc. And the collection itself seems to owe more to the pared-down contents of Domus or Freeze magazine than bowed ballet flats or cork wedges. Throughout, abstract motifs, textured layers and a dark, sandy colour palette add an experimental touch to flowing waist dresses, neckless coats and pleated skirts tailored with his trademark cool precision.

“You need to catch in the air what’s changing and be able to translate that into a message that’s a modern fashion message

but also linked with the history and heritage of the brand,” he tells me, trying to put into words the balancing act he performs each season. “I start by constructing a story,” he adds, “a sort of a puzzle, then adding elements. Thinking about what is a woman, what is a man. What they like and what they expect from a brand such as Ferragamo. This is the principle.”

He doesn’t design with a demographic in mind: “Never.

I’m not interested in age.” Nor does he design for local tastes (although sizing does vary between markets, and he tries to incorporate some summery and wintery pieces into each collection). Nor does he do so with any celebrities in mind, an interesting revelation given the label’s longstanding association with them. The Ferragamo woman, for him, is “a woman who’s extremely dynamic, who loves to mix colours and textures with the richness of her precious skin.”

Fashion and how people wear it has changed, he tells me. And for the better. It is no longer dictated and brought to life only by designers and celebrities.

Now it is more democratic; belongs among the people.

“Interaction between fashion and the consumer is bringing a new dimension to the fashion itself,” he says. Nor is it about complete looks anymore. “In the past it was extremely common to see a total look from a designer. Nowadays everybody wants to add something of their own personality, taste or experience.” It’s about “layering, mixing, a contamination of styles,” he adds, and “bringing your life to what you’re wearing.”

Given these views, you might think he doesn’t put much stock in the good old-fashioned (and still gleefully elitist) catwalk show. But you’d be wrong. They are “extremely important,” he says, because “everybody today has access to a fashion show. Even

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The Ferragamo woman is a woman who’s extremely dynamic, who loves to mix colours and textures with the richness of her precious skin. if you’re not seated on the front row, you can just click to see it.”

Cinematic affairs staged in unusual locations, his have garnered an industry-wide reputation for their narrative fantasy elements and attention to detail. Perhaps his most impressive was the show he mounted in the Louvre in 2012, when models sauntered down a 140-metre-long catwalk wearing intricate crochet dresses and over-the-knee snakeskin boots in pale sandy and grey shades that matched the stone colonnades looming above them. “What I love about them is the emotion, the music, the soundtrack, the set, the models, the hair, the makeup, the styling of the collection,” he explains. “That’s why I call it cinematography, because it’s nine minutes in which you send out a message for the year.” bout halfway through our interview, Massimiliano loosens up. An endearing boyish grin emerges from behind the starched collar and designer stubble. The slick patter that rarely deviates from the familyapproved official line segues into conversation about how he got here. We talk about the ten years he spent working his way up the Ferragamo ranks. And how,beforethat,thereweresome very heated discussions about the direction his life should take.

Although it was fashion he was most passionate about, the young Massimiliano studied literature at university. This was the result of an “Italian compromise” with his father, who told him: “Do what you want – but after university.” (This echoes the trials of the great Salvatore, whose own father told him, “You cannot be a shoemaker, Salvatore. You must be a good boy and behave yourself and do as your parents tell you”).

Then came a course at Polimoda, a Florentine fashion school with ties to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and London College of Fashion, both of which he spent an eye-

opening semester at. In retrospect, the circuitous route into fashion proved beneficial: “It gave me an extra element to play with, in the sense that I approached my fashion course with a different perspective. I was not interested in being astonished; I was more interested in construction.”

Fourteen years ago – on July 1st, 2000, to be exact – he joined Ferragamo’s men’s wear division. But there were concerns about this, too. “I was coming from a women's wear background and Ferragamo offered me a position as a knitwear designer for men's wear. But at that time, men's wear was an extremely small market segment. Also, Salvatore himself never designed anything for men except a bag he used as a tool bag, and shoes for Andy Warhol. It was an extremely big challenge. All my friends were saying I’m crazy because nobody from men's wear goes into women's wear.”

He knuckled down, and the gamble paid off ten years later, in 2010, when Wanda offered him the creative director role – and his first women's wear collection earned critical acclaim, and support from the celebrity avant garde, including Lady Gaga, who performed on US chat show The View wearing his houndstooth print dress and matching headto-toe accessories. Since then, he has brought his subtly modern vision to bear on both men's and women's wear, proven himself as adept at flattering the female form as he is reinterpreting men's duffle coats and slimly-tailored trousers.

Is there a big difference between designing for men and women? “Now that I’m working on both, I have to say that men’s tailoring is something unique,” he explains. “When you open a men’s jacket and a women’s jacket, they are completely different.

The hand stitching, the way you fix the undercollar inside the lining – it’s a completely different world.”

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Was it hard making the switch back to women's wear? Yes and no, he says. “Men's wear is something that’s quite new to the Salvatore Ferragamo world, so I was much freer in a way to define it. It was a kind of gymnasium in which I could really train myself, and come to understand from one side the spirit and the essence of Salvatore Ferragamo.” Women's wear, on the other hand, is more adventurous. “Women are much more open-minded and much more open to radical changes. From one season to the other you can completely rethink and reinvent things; whereas with men’s wear you have fewer elements to play with.

It’s a restriction.”

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ost fashion lovers are familiar with the Ferragamo story, and the divine shoes born of it. One of 14 children, Salvatore was a poor but preternaturally gifted cobbler who, after moving to 1920s Hollywood and studying anatomyinhissparetime,became “Shoemaker to the Stars.” Faced with a growing client list, but loathe to employ massproduction machinery or techniques, he headed back to Italy and settled in Florence, where he found the “noble leatherwork” that could meet his exacting standards. After this came the radical designs that transformed humble materials such as cellophane, cork and raffia (Fascist Italy was living under self-sufficiency policies and trade sanctions that prevented the inflow of more luxurious materials) into fantastical shoes.

Fittings with Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Greta Garbo followed; as did over 350 shoe-design patents.

It is a fairytale that still sells shoes – and enchants – today.

On the morning of my interview, a group of young Asian tourists huddled outside the Palazzo Spini Feroni, waiting for Ferragamo’s basement museumto open.Once inside, they found an exhibition, “The Amazing Shoemaker,” that pays homage

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to Salvatore’s mastery of shoe-making with displays of some of his most iconic creations, a short movie by Mauro Borrelli, and even a graphic novel by Frank Espinosa. Anyone emerging from it would be able to reel off the highs and lows in the brand's history – and pick a few favourites from the archive.

Which are Massimiliano's? After a brief pause, he lists the iconic Rainbow shoes (the towering, multi-coloured platforms created for Judy Garland), Salvatore’s leather tool bag, and the animal-print scarves. This leads us to the question of his own legacy – what does he hope to be remembered for?

“The most important goal of my work here is my creating a lifestyle brand," he replies.

"When I started working at Ferragamo it was a shoe brand, but nowadays this knowledge and knowhow is being translated into many different products.”

In other words, when people look back, he hopes they list the diversification into fragrances, jewellery and sunglasses, as well as the shoes and clothes.

It’s a slightly pat answer that brings to mind Suzy Menkes’ sentiments on old maisons in the modern age: “Do we really want a world where no house, however dusty, never dies and, conversely, there is no wildchild designer who can have totally free expression?”

I ask him whether he ever thinks about leaving to set up his own brand. “I don’t know,” he says. “I still feel very comfortable with this position. Sometimes people ask me if I feel frustrated working for Salvatore Ferragamo, but I feel blessed.” He believes that, in addition to the brand name and quality assurance that goes with that, you’re also getting something singularly Massimiliano. “There’s my creativity, my personality, my style, but I connect and link it with the story of the brand. There’s my way of constructing a jacket, and when I use draping, there’s my way of draping.”

Sometimes people ask me if I feel frustrated working for Salvatore Ferragamo, but I feel blessed.

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'Made in Italy’ is our priority, and one of the symbols of the brand. Developing a second line is just not realistic.

Another question mark hanging over Ferragamo’s future is that of diffusion lines. Versus by Versace, Marc by Marc Jacobs (MBMJ), See by Chloé – many luxury brands have put out less expensive, secondary lines that allow them to reach out to a younger consumer, and without compromising their reputation. Will Ferragamo be following suit? “No second lines, for sure, because ‘Made in Italy’ is our priority, and one of the symbols of the brand. Developing a second line is just not realistic.”

He’s referring to the challenge of meeting growing mass-scale demand when your production line relies – nay, insists – on place-based craftsmanship.

This is not a new problem for the brand. As Sonnet Stanfill writes in The Glamour of Italian Fashion: Since 1945, a book accompanying the recent V&A exhibition of the same name: “The challenge of how to scale up artisanal production to meet growing international interest was a problem that Salvatore Ferragamo himself had faced even before the outbreak of the Second World War.” Here in 2014, the solution, says Massimiliano, is to stick to special projects and capsule collections.

Also idiosyncratic is Ferragamo’s cautiousness when it comes to the social-media-feeding exercises that many other maisons engage in, such as artist tie-ups. While many, including ones run by old famiglia italiana, put out collections inspired by art, or collaborations with artists, Ferragamo tends to hold back.

This isn’t because Massimiliano (or the Ferragamo family for that matter) isn’t into art; he is. In a big way. “I’m an extremely passionate art collector. I spend all my money buying art.”

That said, he’s not convinced many of these collaborations work. “I don’t really understand how you can collaborate with an artist just to put a piece of artwork on a T-shirt. That to

me is making everything more gimmicky.” Later, he adds: “I think it’s extremely important to protect your brand – being involved and being democratic doesn’t mean you have to put your name to everything. Sometimes you also have to say no.”

He would much rather use his time fusing his artistry with Ferragamo's ancestry, as Salvatore would have wanted, and on getting better at what he does. Having a wide range of interests goes hand in hand with this, he believes (“When I close the door of my office, I never talk about fashion,” he reveals.)

So, too, does teaching and being open to creative input from others. “It’s important to always be surrounded by people with new and fresh energy, because there’s a moment at which you don’t understand the world anymore. It doesn’t mean anything to me to be in an ivory tower,” he says.

Ironically for a brand with such strong filial ties (while a third of its shares are listed on Milan’s stock exchange, the majority of the company is owned by 70 family members) and a fixation on “Made in Italy,” his team includes Koreans, Scots and Danes. But for Massimiliano this internationalism makes perfect sense given the brand’s surging popularity in previously untapped markets such as South America and – most notably – Asia. “We are an Italian brand, of course; but at the same time my limit is no longer just Florence – the limit is now the world itself.”

This closing comment touches on the dilemma facing many family-run luxury brands as they gear up for long-term survival. Hiring outsiders – even well-mannered Italian ones – risks watering down your blood line and principles. Not that the Ferragamo family should be too worried. In Massimiliano Giornetti they have proof that an outsider can be exactly what's needed to keep an old brand fresh.

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Chan Soma’s weaving pavilion

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Weaving Heritage t’s eight in the morning and workers are entering Chan Soma weaving house in the Isaan village of Ban Tha Sawang. The day starts early here, as it has for over a decade now, ever since the fine art of silk weaving returned home.

Soon I find Kaek sitting at the head of the largest loom I’ve ever seen. It stands three metres tall and plunges three metres down into the ground. Four people are needed to control it. Kaek’s job is to operate the loom while three of her colleagues keep the strands untangled and help lace in gold threads.

Becoming a weaver here entails months of intensive training under the watchful eye of Ajarn Weeradhamma Taragoonngernthai, the Surin native responsible for reviving the ancient technique of brocade silk weaving. And he’s an absolute stickler for perfection – allows no room for error.

While waiting, I have a chance to see for myself the difficulty weavers

Weeradhamma Taragoonngernthai has dedicated his life to preserving a national treasure at Surin’s Ban Tha Sawang. by top koaysomboon / photography by chakkapan im-aree

Silk reeling

have in arranging the various silk and gold threads so that Kaek can comb them into their final pattern. The difficulty arises “because of the complexity of the patterns,” explains Nirun, Weeradhamma’s assistant. When weaving, there are vertical warp threads and horizontal weft threads. Weavers need heddles – wire cords that run parallel to each other – to guide weft threads through warp threads and create patterns. Thus, the more complicated a pattern is, the more heddles are needed and the more time is consumed. “We make up to 1,416 heddles for each piece.

That’s why we need special looms and so much time,” Nirun says, shedding light on why the price of a swatch of brocade silk from Ban Tha Sawang is so high.

Another reason: each of the designs, which blend folk motifs such as garudas, mythical flowers and Brahman gods, is unique to each piece. “I design them all

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I’m inspired by the silk technique and patterns used during the period of the Ayutthaya kingdom, some 400 years ago.

myself,” says Weeradhamma. “I get my inspiration from the silk techniques and patterns of the Ayutthaya kingdom, some 400 years ago.”

His reception chamber is housed in a traditional Thai pavilion; its walls adorned with lustrous examples of his work.

Born in Ban Tha Sawang, he once served as a fine-arts teacher at Queen Sirikit’s Silpacheel project, an initiative by Her Majesty to raise people’s living standards by offering them jobs in the traditional Thai arts. “It’s always been my dream to preserve this heritage and pass it on to the next generation,” he tells me. So when HM Queen Sirikit set out to revive the making of ancient brocade silk, Weeradhamma was reminded of a time when he was a boy living in the village and women weaved Brocade silk during the weaving process

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Silk yarns are air-dried after the dying process

their own silk using old methods.

He himself had learned how to prepare dyes and weave silk. He thus decided to return home to revive the long-lost skills of his ancestors, marrying folklore with papers and fabrics found in the royal archives. That was in 1997.

“When I came back, people were not weaving as much as was when I was young. The interest in silk weaving had dropped because the younger generation thought it was too time-consuming and didn’t make good money,” Weeradhamma explains. There were difficulties in training and in convincing people to pick up the old skills, he adds, but these were soon overcome.

Today, Ban Tha Sawang is home to weavers and their families. Young kids run around, playing with dogs, while their mothers work. Baan Tha Sawang has become a tourist destination that welcomes silk afficionados from all over the world to see the long-lost weaving technique in action.

In reviving this ancient art, Weeradhamma has breathed new

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life into previously extinct processes, such as the use of natural dyes and the traditional method of reeling. Nirun takes me to the outdoor workshop to see the colour preparation process. Nine stoves are boiling away, billowing huge steam clouds. “The red comes from krang [the resinous secretion of lac insects], blue from indigo plants, and yellow from kaenlae wood,” he explains. From these primary colours, additional colours can be

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Before Ban Tha Sawang became a tourist attraction, Weeradhamma was the main supplier of silk to the royal bureau.

made. Weeradhamma invented a long, complicated dyeing process to treat the materials so that they bring out the best, brilliant hue – and it’s a closely guarded formula.

Laughing, Niran points out big jars of indigo steeping in alkaline water. “Only Ajarn knows when these plants are ready for dyeing.”

The silk used is the most delicate kind: mai noi, which means “little silk.” Silk threads are dyed

several times until they reach the most vivid tints. Mai noi are the last threads to be taken from the filature process – the thinest, softest and rarest. Coupled with the brocade technique that Weeradhamma found in the royal archives and adapted, these threads become silk fabrics similar to those produced in the glory days of the old kingdoms. “I feel overjoyed to be able to carry on such a long-lost heritage,” he says.

Before Ban Tha Sawang became a tourist attraction, Weeradhamma was the main supplier of silk to the royal bureau, providing fabrics for special exhibitions, royal gifts and the annual royal khon performance. In 2003, he was tasked with designing and producing the brocaded silk used to dress Asia Pacific government leaders attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Bangkok. This was, in retrospect, the turning point for the weaving house – the moment when outsiders started

taking a real interest in the craft.

“More and more people started visiting us, which was great for the community,” says Weeradhamma. “Visitors show a real interest in silk production. They get to learn the complications inherent in making fine silk fabrics, which gives them a true appreciation for it. And as we do not retail our products, they go out and buy silk from local vendors and it helps the local economy,” he says.

Today, Weeradhamma is still a royal silk supplier. Special orders cost at least 30,000 baht per metre, and take at least three months to produce. But despite the high price tag – maybe even because of it – silks from Chan Soma weaving house are highly popular among high-society

The loom plunges three metres into the ground

Natural dyes are used

women and celebrities, especially brides-to-be.

Even though he’s busy working on new designs for fabrics for the next royal khon performance, Weeradhamma is making time to oversee the construction of a small museum inside the Chan Soma complex. Why? “I want to pass down this art form to the next generation,” he says. “Every day it gets harder to find people who love this work, so I hope Chan Soma can become a learning centre for those who are interested.”

Come 5pm, Kaek shows us how much progress she has made.

To be honest, I don’t see much difference from this morning, but she looks happy. “We’ve done six or seven centimetres,” she says, “We’ve been really productive today!”

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arlier this year the venerable Diane von Furstenberg tried to an estimated 500 million consumers by the year 2030, and to make Google Glass cool. It wasn’t her first attempt – warned luxury goods houses to diversify to meet the needs of that was during New York Fashion Week 2013, when she sent these disparate consumers, “else risk falling behind.” models down the runway wearing Google Glass, after which she The consumer types they identified are as follows: the appeared, flanked on the runway by Google co-founder Sergey Conservative, favouring mainstream stores and brands; the Brin and designer Yvan Mispelaere, all wearing Glass. Then, Opinionated – mostly Gen Xers and Yers with high fashion in June this year she unleashed her Made for Glass frames, intelligence, influenced by social networks; the Hedonist, as available on Net-a-Porter for US $1,725 a pair. Fashion critics much in love with the experience of luxury shopping as the goods were critical. The price was prohibitive for Glass enthusiasts and themselves; the Omnivore, a novice buyer with little brand the design still too geeky for the fashion-forward. Is this clunky, loyalty; the Wannabe, a young, entry-level buyer; the Investor, in-your-face hybrid really the future of luxury fashion? favouring durable items like watches; and the Disillusioned, No one in the fashion world – besides DvF – seems convinced. mature buyers unmoved by campaigns and advertising.

The requisite accessibility of tech products is fundamentally In this heterogeneous marketplace, brands must differentiate incompatible with the exclusive nature of high fashion items. So if themselves and cater not only to different global markets but the future of luxury goods isn’t to different consumer types a pair of designer computer within those markets. Luxury sunglasses, what is? Is it 3D houses need to implement printing? Enhanced online “an immediate upgrade to shopping experiences? Hightheir consumer strategies profile collaborations and to recognise and react to hyper-exclusivity? And will this growing diversity,” said sustainability and ethics find a Bain’s Milan-based Claudia better foothold in the future D’Arpizio. They must address luxury realm? all the needs of the consumer The luxury goods industry segments identified, try to was worth 217 billion euro reach those with the highest in 2013 according to website spending potential, and “invest Statista.com, a figure that in capturing the attention and Sustainability, technology, ethics, represents a slow-down imagination of new potential exclusivity – what will define in growth of two percent shoppers who could be buying luxury fashion in the future? compared to the previous luxury today but who aren’t.” year; this represents an For a luxury maison, catering expected period of “stabilisation,” say analysts. Key industry to a variety of different demographics is a tightrope act. It was players are yet trying to forecast the consumer trends and not that long ago that Gucci faced bankruptcy after diluting their technological advances that will shape the industry’s future prestige by trying to appeal to too many people and over-licensing growth, in order to safeguard reputation and revenue well into the brand (before Domenico de Sole and Tom Ford came to the the 21st century. rescue). Burberry suffered a similar loss of perceived exclusivity in the early 2000s when their house check became the uniform of The future is diverse “chavs,” echoed in everything from caps to hair scrunchies. Brand In January of this year, global management consulting firm ubiquity had tarnished the pedigree these high-end brands had Bain and Company released a report entitled “Lens on the spent generations creating.

Worldwide Luxury Consumer.” The report compiled data If luxury brands want to continue to prosper for the next from 10,000 luxury consumers across 10 countries, identifying hundred years, they must simultaneously diversify, appeal to new a heterogeneous luxury marketplace – one made up of seven markets, strengthen brand identity, foster prestige and exclusivity, distinct types of consumers from the estimated 300 million and, says Bain, “delight and truly engage” their existing customer that exist worldwide. They projected this number would rise base. For the luxury consumer, however, it’s a win/win situation.

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by bek van vliet / illustrations by terawat teankaprasith

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The business of online president of e-business at Kering, Federico Barbieri. “In digital, Some old-world maisons still reject the idea of e-commerce. if you want to keep engaging the consumer and keep positioning Chanel and Dior sell only cosmetics and fragrance online. your brand and moulding your business, you have to do it. There Céline, Prada and Louis Vuitton sell accessories but don’t retail is no barrier, and the future is there, and you have to define what ready-to-wear collections over the Internet. Miuccia Prada even a luxury brand experience is online.” went on record with Women’s Wear Daily last year, saying, “We don’t like it. I don’t care. My husband hates it and we think that, for Customisation is king luxury, it’s not right.” Many of these brands keep apparel offline Exclusivity is a crucial facet of luxury – this is in part why as a way of maintaining exclusivity and upholding their traditional e-commerce is such a contentious topic among the more in-store luxury experience. Indeed, the democratic nature of the traditional maisons. Yet some have figured out a way of Internet is at odds with the discriminative culture of the bricksfostering exclusivity while simultaneously giving consumers a memorable e-commerce experience: online and-mortar high-end shopping experience, customisation. “Just owning a recognisable where sales assistants can make sure their goods symbol is not enough,” states Dubai marketing will be seen on the “right” person. firm BGP Group in The 8 Ps of Luxury Brand But brands reticent to jump on the e-tailing Marketing. Consumers need to feel they have bandwagon are making a huge mistake, says differentiated themselves by owning a one-off Bloomberg Business Week’s Kurt Soller. Their refusal The old-world item unique to them, “to further confirm their to make ready-to-wear available in the online maisons’ social status and to stand out among equals.” marketplace illustrates “luxury’s dumbest refusal to As Tom Ford told the Wall Street Journal back in paradox.” These brands use Twitter and make ready-to2007: “Everybody wants to have something Instagram to market their products and even wear available different….A woman doesn’t necessarily want live-stream runway shows via their websites, he in the online the same bag her friend has.” points out, yet won’t make collections available In a strategy that provides an exciting online online. marketplace shopping experience and satiates the buyer’s Federico Marchetti, founder and CEO of is ‘luxury’s desire for a unique luxury item, an increasing Yoox Group, the online retailing partner of dumbest amount of maisons are offering bespoke brands such as Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, paradox.’ modifications online. Rather than worry about Brunello, Maison Martin Margiela, Bally and dilution and accessibility, they’re harnessing more, told WWD there’s no chance of dilution the power of the internet to enhance exclusivity. in the current market, that the e-commerce These savvier heritage houses are taking the industry is too young to facilitate brand opportunity to connect with customers – new saturation. “We’re at the very beginning of the and existing – more intimately by offering story,” he said in an interview with the fashion website last year. “The potential is much bigger; the future is customisation through their online stores. Among this list are more important than the present.”

Louis Vuitton, Longchamp, Valentino, Burberry, Bottega Some stand-out brands investing in e-commerce – and Veneta, Manolo Blahnik and Gucci. defining the way consumers will engage with luxury fashion in Of course, the amount of customisation possible is limited to a the future – are Saint Laurent, Valentino and Burberry – all handful of elements: monogramming, fabric and colour choice, of whom have embraced online retailing via their own stores trim and minor embellishments. Customers can’t be trusted and via third parties such as Net-a-Porter, without suffering with free reign over all the aesthetic variables – even respected any cannibalisation of sales. Givenchy doesn’t have an e-store, artists sometimes fall short with their customisations. (Just take a but has its own apps – one for men and one for women – and look at Kim Kashardian’s Hermès Kelly bag painted by George also sells through Net-a-Porter. Most of Kering’s brands have Condo for the perfect example of that.) But allowing small embraced e-commerce. “I can’t understand why the industry modifications and initials is a “safe” way of giving consumers a has been hesitant or shy about jumping into it,” says senior vice personal connection with their luxury purchases. With increasing

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numbers of mature shoppers becoming net-literate, and with the Millennial generation now armed with (their parents’) credit cards, the ability to customise luxury purchases online could very well become de rigueur for all houses.

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consumer demographics. Maison Martin Margiela, for example, this year released a collection of five wallpapers (for homes, not computers) with Belgian brand Omexco. They also collaborated with Mykita on a range of sunglasses, stepping away from the fastfashion scene for now (they already did that with their H&M capsule collection in 2012).

Cars and fashion are overlapping more and more as well. Louis Vuitton’s recent collaboration with BMW i8 sees the prestigious French house creating carbon fibre luggage specifically for use with the hybrid sports car. Then there’s the 2014 Infiniti Q50 hybrid one-of-a-kind sedans, designed by Thom Browne and Zac Posen. Each designer loaned their creative nous to both interiors and exteriors for these hyper-exclusive cars. As part of the project, they also released a limited-edition item to complement their car’s design, exclusive to luxury e-commerce site Gilt.com.

Laidback luxe The future looks to be a really comfortable place, if the trend towards luxury leisure wear continues. Luring Wannabe consumers types with accessible price points and appealing to Opinionated consumers who like to mix-and-match high-end with high street are collaborative trainer collections. Over the last couple of seasons, we’ve seen a huge output of collaborative projects that focus on shoes and leisurewear: Rick Owens with Adidas, Maison Martin Margiela with Converse, Kenzo with Vans, Riccardo Tisci and Alexander Wang with Nike – the list goes on. It was a logical step from the phenomenon of high-end designers releasing capsule collections for fast-fashion 3D printing and new technologies Just as the giants like H&M, Target and Top Shop. The 3D printing is the buzzword of the decade Internet has trend has come so far as to have bled into the thus far, and it has huge ramifications for democratised maisons, who are now releasing designer kicks of the fashion industry. Some posit that 3D information, 3D their own. printing and “additive fashion” will never fully printing may Forget affordable, accessible trainers – integrate with couture – the foundation of which do the same with haute leisure wear growing in popularity, is old-fashioned craftsmanship and the use for fashion. stoked by the hip-hop industry’s obsession of fine, hard-to-acquire, artisanal materials. with hyper high-end urban clothing, designer 3D-printed items are by definition not handtrainers are often more expensive than formal crafted. The medium may become popular for dress shoes. French and Italian houses – longemerging and avant-garde designers, but for time purveyors of leather craftsmanship, fine the foreseeable future it seems limited to bold, tailoring and sophisticated dressing – are now synthetic accessories. offering couture sports shoes with hefty price tags.

On the other hand, some high-fashion houses Run-of-the-mill Valentino and Chanel are embracing the possibilities. It seems remiss women’s sneakers retail from roughly US $400 not to at least try. In London at the beginning to US $800 a pair. The former offers online customisation of of the year, Richard Beckett of Pringles of Scotland sent jackets said shoes. For men, the list of designer sneakers is nothing embroidered with nylon-sintered patterns and 3D-printed short of bewildering. Gucci, Giuseppi Zanotti, Lanvin, Fendi, embellishments down the runway for Autumn/Winter 2014.

Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Dolce and Gabbana, DSquared2, These garments were beautifully tailored and suitable for MMM, Rick Owens and Jimmy Choo all offer sneakers around everyday wear, proving a real-world application of the medium. the $300 mark and up. But if you really want to convey exclusivity 3D-printed fashion had previously only been in outrageous – and avoid puddles – nothing quite sends the message out like costume-ish design (see: the sci-fi creations of Iris van Herpen or a pair of new-season Rick Owens lace-less high-tops at $5,152.

Asher Levine, both for Lady Gaga.)

That’s not to say high-end brands will halt collaborations all Laser-cutting, too, is developing in ready-to-wear. The together, in favour of vertical product-line extension. While technology has been around for decades, yet it’s only now being diffusion lines might slow down as the older maisons steer clear accepted into high fashion. Tod’s latest season collection features from brand dilution, creative horizontal brand extension and velvet-soft leathers cut with intricate patterns. Roberto Cavalli is cross-industry collaborations could be a way of tapping into new also putting the technology to good use with delicately patterned

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booties and resort dresses that sport highly detailed cut-outs. It’s Yet there are some organisations and spokespeople trying to proof that laser-cut pieces needn’t be stiff or inorganic, and that change industry attitudes. There’s activist Livia Firth, who started automated techniques can live side-by-side with traditional arts Eco Age and has worked with Chopard to release the world’s and crafts. first “fair-mined” watch, the L.U.C Tourbillon. There’s Stella Francis Bitoni is one designer pioneering more radical 3D McCartney, one of fashion’s most outspoken ambassadors for printing in couture. He created a Swarovski crystal “gown” for Dita sustainable, ethical clothing. There’s Swedish jeans brand Nudie, von Teese last year, and recently unveiled his Cloud Collection whose “Fair Wear” denim is made from 100 percent organically of decorative bowls, for which he has made the code available grown cotton. There are Instagram accounts, websites, online for free. Anyone with access to a 3D printer can print one out. forums and research centres (such as London’s Centre for Wearable items from the designer include a line of accessories that Sustainable Fashion) all devoted to the cause. In New York, the merge 3D-printed elements with traditional materials in what he “Slow Fashion” movement follows that of “Slow Food,” bolstered calls “hyper-luxury, or a post-human luxury, by the CFDA’s new Fashion Manufacturing that will take us beyond our own capabilities.”

Initiative, which aims to revitalise the city’s Bitoni illustrates how 3D printing may change garment-making industry. The movement the fashion industry by making new designs encourages “conscious consumption,” urging immediately accessible to the masses. Just as consumers to invest money in quality, locally the Internet has democratised information, made items – a mantra oft-trumpeted by the The fashion 3D printing may do the same for fashion. old-world luxury houses. If the slow fashion industry is, Decoded Fashion’s Liz Bacelar is wary of trend develops the same way slow food did, in many these developments, however, telling Mashable: we can expect it to be warmly embraced by the respects, “Selling code is not something that sounds middle and upper classes. antithetical inviting to designers. It’s like you’re selling to sustainability the sketch but letting go of how it’s produced.

Robo-couture and seems Designers spend so much time selecting the Butbacktowearabletech.It’sunlikelytheconcept right material, deciding how it’s going to be will ever truly die, as difficult as it is to imagine it largely stitched, how it’s going to be cut. To let that all ever becoming truly stylish. Luxury maisons old unconcerned go is incredibly scary.” and new are built on exclusivity, and the value of with ethics. their products relies on their paucity. Certainly, Luxury with a conscience we have seen items become momentarily Diamonds, leather, fur, sweatshops – the fashionable in a faddish way, (Nike+Fuel, for fashion industry is, in many respects, instance) but any tech that succeeds in being antithetical to sustainability and seems largely “cool” is destined to be short-lived. Mass unconcerned with ethics when it comes to produced and quickly obsolete, wearable tech topics such as animal skin and leather tanneries. For most just isn’t something on which an esteemed fashion house can design houses, ethics are trumped by aesthetics – just take a look build prestige. at London’s runway shows earlier this year, where Alexander Is there any way the worlds of high fashion and tech hardware McQueen, Prada, Tom Ford and even Vivienne Westwood can successfully intersect? Handbag designer Rebecca Minkoff’s included fur in their Autumn/Winter 2014 collections.

Stellé Audio Couture clutch provides some hope. Retailing at US Financial Times blogger Vanessa Freedman pointed out recently $399, four different clutch designs conceal miniature speakers that only two luxury companies – L’Oreal and Shisheido – made that connect to any Bluetooth device. And there’s still light at the Ethisphere’s World’s Most Ethical Companies list. “I could not end of the tunnel for Google Glass. Google recently announced a help noticing the absence of, say, Kering,” she writes, “which just deal with Italian eyewear giant Luxxotica Group, maker of RayBan announced a partnership with surf supremo Kelly Slater to both and Oakley, a collaboration which vows to produce “a new breed produce a new clothing line and have him be an ambassador for of eyewear for Glass.” If anyone can make Glass fashionable, it’s ‘sustainability.’” She also notes the absence of LVMH, “which has the company who made Wayfarers and Aviators iconic totems pages upon pages on their website devoted to CSR policies,” and of cool. As to whether the 2015 release date for the new designs Tiffany & Co, “which has strict policies about sourcing its gems will signal a turning-point for wearable technology, and for high and gold in the most ethical way.” fashion, only time will tell.

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Sometimes doing good means doing bad, and sometimes it means just plain old doing good. Among Thailand’s voluntourism concerns, the Bamboo Project negotiates this difference better than most. by lary wallace / illustrations by thanawat chaweekallayakul

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aybe it should be called the Gilded Rule instead. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” works just fine, more often than not and as a basic functioning principle. But then there are those times — and they are not infrequent — when this strategy can leave everyone involved worse off than they’d been before. Nowhere does the Golden Rule appear less substantial and sustainable — nowhere does it appear more gilded — than in the realm of voluntourism.

Voluntourism is the name, recently tarnished, for the phenomenon of usually-well-meaning foreigners arriving from developed nations and incorporating volunteer service in the itinerary of their tourism packages.

You will not have to go far or look hard to witness the variety of grievance this practise attracts.

“The problem with voluntourism is its singular focus on the volunteer’s quest for experience, as opposed to the recipient community’s actual needs.” This comes from an opinion piece on the Al Jazeera website from earlier this year entitled “The White Tourist’s Burden.” It’s an impressively comprehensive catalogue of complaints on the issue.

The Indonesian orphans of Bali, writes Rafia Zakaria, “are forced to beg on the streets for food and money in order to attract orphan tourism.” “A communitydirected approach,” he writes, “instead of a touristdetermined one, would have invested in helping the families develop skills necessary to tackle their primary need, poverty.” This is all little more than the the machinery “of a burgeoning white-saviour

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complex,” designed expressly to give the entitled affluent a story to tell that places them in the ranks of the kindhearted and worldly wise.”

It’s a cogent argument, compelling and convincing. It also manages to deny what’s best about voluntourism by ignoring everything except what’s worst. he first time Steve Williams came to Thailand, it was to do volunteer work, and it was not even his idea. The woman he was dating at the time was a London police officer; her employer would give her the time off work she needed for a round-the-world trip — some six months — only if she incorporated a certain percentage of volunteer work into her travel plans.

They went around the world. Williams was already very well-travelled, by just about any standards you care to cite. He was working in sales in the UK. It was lucrative work, and Steve, a recreational distance runner, brought to it an energy and industry that made him a success. Prosperity brought no deep satisfaction, and, with his impossibly long hours, even began to feel like something

You will not have to go far or look hard to witness the variety of grievance voluntourism attracts.

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of a prison. In Thailand he spent three months on volunteer projects. He got on so well with the guy who owned the volunteer company that he was offered the opportunity to work for him, in sales, once he returned to the UK. A short time later, Williams was asked to come out and work in Thailand. That was seven years ago.

Williams was with that company three years before things started to change, and he began realising they were no longer always conducting their projects with righteous intentions. Sometimes the length of a project would be dragged out just to maximise profit.

A colleague of his, Mark Foster Murray, had noticed the same thing and was equally appalled.

“That had been going on for a long time,” Murray says today, “and it took a lot of courage for Steve and I to stand up and go, ‘We’re gonna set up our own company, we’re not gonna get paid for so many months, we’re going to work our damned hardest to make sure we do things right — to make sure we do it the way it should be done.’”

Together, they founded the Bamboo Project, with Williams focusing mostly on operations and Murray on marketing. Four years later, they’ve managed to establish the Bamboo Project as a tour company that provides not just volunteer opportunities but adventure tours as well — adventure tours that in fact help subsidise the volunteer projects, and, beyond that, ensure that those projects never have to be driven primarily by the profit motive.

It’s allowed them to avoid, in Murray’s words, “cheap projects that on the surface look like they’re actually helping, when underneath, it’s just all to make money. And there’s nothing wrong with profit, because essentially you need profit for a company to exist and sustain itself. However, there has to be the right balance — the community has to benefit more

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than the company does. And the more volunteers we get, the bigger and better the projects. It shouldn’t be: the more volunteers we get, the more money I get to spend on my personal lavish lifestyle. It’s that simple.”

They work with NGOs local to each project, to ensure responsible oversight and a concern for the community’s best interests.

“It’s our job to find these NGOs,” Williams says, “look at the projects they’re doing and decide whether we agree with it, do a little bit of research into the NGO and decide whether what they’re doing is of benefit to the community. Does the community actually need it; do they want it; is it actually being run with the community or is it something that’s being dictated to the community? So that’s down to us to kind of do this research and look into.”

They work with local NGOs because they understand only too well the perils of the perception, to say nothing of the perils of the reality, of wellintentioned Westerners coming into a community and laying down terms. “We don’t want,” says Williams, “to be the big white man who goes in and says, ‘You’re doing it all wrong.’ These communities have existed for hundreds of years without us, so who are we to say, ‘Let’s change it’?” oluntourists are a pretty easy target for anybody looking for one. It’s very fashionable to denounce wealthy Westerners, and it’s doubtful that anyone in recent years who’s done so has found himself worse

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off than he’d been before. One reformed voluntourist, named Ossob Mohamud, has written recently in the UK’s The Guardian of the “condescending and superficial relationships that transform the (usually Western) volunteer into a benevolent giver and community members into the ever grateful receivers of charity,” while also confessing that, during her own voluntourism experience, “I could never shake off the feeling that it was all a bit too self-congratulatory and disingenuous.”

It would be nice if Mohamud were speaking only for herself here, rather than projecting her own impure impulses on everyone who’s ever done what she did. But she’s not. She’s presuming to speak for multitudes.

Fortunately, there have been many voices recently coming to voluntourism’s defence — a backlash against the backlash, I guess you could say. In The Huffington Post earlier this year, Daniel Papi, who works in global development, asked, “Is ‘Voluntourism’ Being Exploited?,” answering in the affirmative: “The problem is that yes, some people are being exploited or misled, both the travellers and the communities they aim to be serving. Yes, not all travel companies, mission trips, or non-profit volunteer placement partners are created equal: some are having a more positive impact than others. And yes, sometimes our egos and desire to ‘do good’ can set us up for failure.”

That said, however, Papi warns against the uselessness of “putting ‘voluntourism’ or any other travel category into a ‘bad’ label and other offerings

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in a ‘good’ label. What is useful about the debates and criticism of our collective goodwill gone awry is when both individuals and the sector as a whole can look at what is working, and what is not, and learn from that — and then transition that learning into more positive action in the future.”

“The argument against voluntourism — I applaud it,” Murray says. “I want people to be asking those questions, because if you’re a legit company, as Bamboo is, you can answer those questions.” t’s a phenomenon that touches every realm of human existence, this paradox of doing harm by trying to do good, and it ranges from the petty to the profound. At one end, it includes Oprah Winfrey giving away Pontiac G6s to all the members of her studio audience, many of whom then have to sell the cars for inability to pay the luxury tax. At the other end, it includes the far more dire and consequential matter of the U.S.’s invasion, disruption, and abandonment of Iraq. These extremes are mirrored in voluntourism itself.

At one end is a painting project in Thailand recently blogged about on HuffPost Impact. It involved US$200 worth of paint that was used to paint a school — or about $150 worth, since an estimated quarter of that was used to inadvertently paint the floor. Besides involving incompetent volunteers, the project itself was one of highly dubious worth.

“The project was in rural Thailand,” writes the blogger, “and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational

It’s a phenomenon that touches every realm of human existence, this paradox of doing harm by trying to do good, and it ranges from the petty to the profound.

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resources...or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job.”

And then there are those far more dire and consequential matters. Most prominent of all, there is the matter of orphan tourism in Cambodia.

One orphanage of 25 children in Cambodia, it was recently reported in the Bangkok Post, had only two actual orphans among its number. The rest were there for the tourists. This breaking-apart of families is far from worth it, according to those closest to the problem, and when you consider the attachment issues that often result, the problem seems even more pernicious. One concerned Cambodian organisation has even found it necessary to remind tourists, in a widely circulated ad campaign, that “Children Are Not Tourist Attractions.”

“I would say 80 percent of those who want to go abroad and volunteer are female,” Williams says, “and I would say 50 percent of those want to work in a childcare setting. They want to work with young kids — they want that photograph of them hugging an orphan for their Facebook profile page. We won’t do that. We will only set up a childcare project — particularly childcare — if it’s run through an NGO that we vet. We will hand the volunteer over to the NGO; they will police it properly. We don’t know anything about it; we’re not specialists in childcare volunteering, so we’re not gonna pretend to be. So for instance, the [childcare] project in Cambodia: this is the third-biggest NGO in Cambodia. They’ve been going for 13 years, they work with 13,000

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people, they’ve got a kindergarten project, they insist on a criminal-records-check certificate, and they won’t accept anybody unless they have that. We put the ball in their court.” he Bamboo Project, though cosmopolitan in its makeup and international in its reach, is very much an integral part of Thailand itself. Williams’ wife, Lerdtida, is a Thai woman whose nickname, “Pai,” happens to be Thai for “bamboo.” They’ve been married for three of the four years they’ve been together, and their son, Tyler, is two-and-a-half.

The company will remain based in Thailand, even as it’s begun to expand its services to regions like Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, India, and the Philippines.

The program director is Thai too, a 27-year-old named May Phonjaroen. Friendly and energetic, she speaks of Bamboo’s mission with the same impassioned idealism as Williams and Murray. She could have worked instead in Surin for her father, who owns a prosperous business, or she could have taken her bachelor’s degree and tour-guide license out on the open market and made more money that way. But she wants to do good and have fun, and is wise enough to understand that one doesn’t have to exclude the other.

How do you explain voluntourism to someone who never considered success on any terms other than the most crassly conventional?

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“People who don’t do this always say: Why don’t you do this, or You should do that. But you can only do so much.”

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On the day I talk to May, she’s recently returned from a few different trips that have taken her all over Thailand. There was a group of students from northern Michigan (accompanied by two professors) participating in their school’s humandevelopment program, and a group of tourists from Australia. There was mixing cement and building with it in Chiang Rai, and there was teaching school in the jungles of Koh Chang. There was elephant care and feeding in Chiang Mai, and hill-tribe-village homestaying in Chiang Rai. None of these projects altered the shape of civilisation, for better or for worse, and that’s kind of the point. Nicholas Kristof, the crusading New York Times columnist whose do-goodism has come into question of late, recently told an audience that he’s “become more sympathetic to Band-Aids over the years,” for the way the ambitious solutions tend to stall-out before they’ve had a chance to get started, and for the way a little something is better than a whole lot of nothing. It’s a view May makes clear she shares when she says, “It’s better than nothing,” and she’s obviously right. It is better than nothing, except when it’s not. But those cases are so rare and so extreme, they deserve to be interrogated on an entirely different plane from voluntourism in the main.

Roger O’Halloran, executive director of the notfor-profit democratic organisation Palms Australia, recently spoke very eloquently on this matter on the Australian talk show Encounter: “You may not agree with voluntourism, you may not like what it represents, you may not like the term — there may be hundreds

of reasons why you are averse to it. But it is the first attempt to bridge the divide between cultures, between for-profit and non-profit, between wealth gaps — spiritual, mental/emotional, wisdom-based, and economic — by accessing the largest industry in the world [i.e., tourism] and the well-meaning of socialsociety organisations as the delivery systems thereby.

We are a long way from completing that bridge, yet the effort deserves more than our maligning condemnation.”

Shannon Kelley, writing in Aeon magazine about delivering vitamins to African communities, wonders aloud to the program president what long-term good they could possibly be doing. He replies: “People who don’t do this always say: Why don’t you do this, or You should do that. But you can only do so much.”

Ten years ago, Murray came over from England and began volunteer-teaching in some of the poorest schools of Thailand, and then he kept at it. He comes from an affluent background, and like Steve and May, he could have been doing other things. “I wanted to be helping communities,” he says. “The time that I’d spent in these communities, with poor people, seeing how they lived, seeing the suffering they went through each day — I wanted to do something to help this. And that was the reason I moved 6,000 miles.”

How do you explain such a thing to someone who can’t possibly relate to values and virtue, who never considered success on any terms other than the most crassly conventional?

You can’t. You can only try, because something is better than nothing, and it’s better, too, than apologising for that which merits no apology.

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FLEMISH FLAIR Belgium’s second city is a style icon with a sparkling history. by keith mundy

The main railway station, Antwerpen-Central

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ne of the world’s busiest ports, the world centre of the diamond trade, a profit-chasing trading city since the Middle Ages, the home town of Peter Paul Rubens and his prolific painting factory – these are the hard-nosed and historical facts that define Antwerp.

Not if you’re a fashionista. Not if you love innovative clothing design.

Not if finding creative new lines is your thing. Because for more than two decades now Belgium’s second city has been a fashion capital, a style icon, a mecca of moda. It’s not a fashion mega-hub like London, Paris or New York, rather a place where local designers have made a distinctive mark and continue to do so, sending out a buzz that can be felt around the world.

It began in the 1980s with a group of fashion graduates from the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, who shot to fame as the Antwerp Six. Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Marina Yee, Dirk Van Saene, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten were their names, with the last two becoming especially successful and globally renowned. They are all still based in Antwerp, with their own operations under distinct brands – although Demeulemeester recently quit her own label – a quarter of a century after their first group show in 1988.

During this time, a slew of younger designers have emerged in the same creative milieu, opening their own shops and studios.

What is so distinctive about this Flemish flowering of fashion?

Veteran fashion journalist, Suzy Menkes, has called it “A Sense of Place,” seeing in their clothes “the textures of wood and stone that appear on buildings with Gothic spires” in their native Flanders and “the colours found in the works of Pieter Breughel the Elder, such as the burnt orange of the servers’ jackets,” referring to the Flemish painter’s The Peasant Wedding of 1567.

Others have spoken of how

Belgian designers turned the fashion world upside-down with their deconstructed clothes – all raw edges and inside-out seams – streamlining silhouettes and conceptual collections with an emphasis on the dark side. Indeed, the Antwerp Six did not represent a single style, but instead – with the rebellious punk spark within them – they espoused an aesthetic that was pointedly different to the luxury houses that were then – and are now – dominating the fashion scene.

Many of the group came from art backgrounds and so had a different perspective on fashion, often using obscure references to marry the worlds of art and design in a way that hadn’t been done before. In essence, they helped establish fashion as an art form in the guise of a commercial product. Does it matter? It’s only clothes, after all, just gladrags and handbags. Well, of course it matters, because as Oscar Wilde once said, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”

That aphorism is stuck to a showcase at ModeNatie, the complex that is the institutional heart of the Antwerp fashion world. In a remodelled nineteenth-century edifice that, aptly, began life as a clothing storehouse, ModeNatie is home to the adventurous ModeMuseum known as MoMu, the Flanders Fashion Institute, and the inspirational Fashion Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

“Mode” is Flemish (and French) for “fashion,” while “Natie” is a Flemish word for a warehousing company or a warehouse – very Antwerp things. In the dock area, warehouses are key elements in the crucial trading role that the city has played for almost a millennium.

ModeNatie sustains this tradition, anchoring fashion in Antwerp and projecting it internationally.

MoMu is a must-see for anyone interested in fashion, a dynamic modern space with exhibits drawn from a collection of 25,000

Stadsfeestzaal

fashion-related items, historical and contemporary. Exhibitions rotate around themes that focus both on fashion and its cultural context. You might see the role of the walking stick or the evolution of the trenchcoat outlined, a multicoloured dress by Walter Van Beirendonck, inspired by the clothing of China’s Hui’an women, or a style jape like a tweed-covered vintage Porsche by Veronique Branquinho, another Antwerp academy graduate. This year’s special exhibition featured plumes and feathers in fashion, and the next one, in 2015, will showcase the works of Dries Van Noten with a retrospective of his designs and an insight into his creative processes.

Last year at ModeNatie the Fashion Department celebrated its 50th anniversary, its graduation show featuring a reunion of the Antwerp Six as the jury for the fourth-year students’ presentations.

The department’s students continue to invigorate the city with new ideas, this buzz attracting designers from elsewhere, who choose to set up in Antwerp a draw from

the entrepreneurial energy and creative heritage that characterises the Flemish city. In Scheldestraat (“straat” means “street”), Japaneseborn designer Izumi Hongo runs his Salon Van Hongo, offering feminine clothes with a sophisticated cut. Even a Thai designer has set up in Antwerp: Ek Thongprasert.

Along with jewellery designer Noon Passama S, Ek started the Curated

by Ek Thongprasert brand, which distributes around the globe.

Antwerp’s back streets conceal quirky enterprises. A solar panel shop near Centraal Station got turned into the eclectic Atelier Solar Shop by menswear designer Jan-Jan Van Essche, stocking his own garments along with fleamarket finds and oddments from around the world. In Maarschalk Gerardstraat, Collectif d’Anvers hammers out bespoke footwear in a light-filled space strung with wooden lasts. The shop out front also sells draped, geometric womenswear

by Sophie Claes. In Emiel Banningstraat, Maureen De Clercq offers a range of elegant adjusted-to-

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City Hall

Antwerp first made it big in the Middle Ages as the hub of the European trade in wool, the period’s crucial clothing material.

Flanders was then also a centre of excellence in the making of tapestries, lace and embroidery.

Antwerp Travel File Getting there Thai Airways flies non-stop to Brussels four times weekly, details at www.thaiairways.co.th .

Trains from Brussels airport direct to Antwerp take 37 minutes.

Getting around Antwerp City Card and Antwerp Fashion Map, available at the tourist offices at Grote Markt 13 and Centraal Station. www.visitantwerpen.be Fashion In Antwerp http://fashioninantwerp.be

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Shopping - Het Modepaleis, Nationalestraat 16 Tel. +32 3 470 2510 www.driesvannoten.be - Ann Demeulemeester, Leopold de Waelplaats, Tel. +32 3 206 0133, www.anndemeulemeester.be/stores - Coccodrillo, Schuttershofstraat 8-9 Tel +32 3 233 2093, coccodrillo.be - DiamondLand, Appelmansstraat 33A Tel. 32 3 369 0780, www.diamondland.be Museums - Mode Museum (MoMu) ModeNatie, Nationalestraat 28 Ttel. +32 3 470 2770, www.momu.be - MAS (Museum Aan de Stroom) Hanzestedenplaats 1 Tel. +32 3 338 4434 www.mas.be - Rubens House Wapper 9 Tel. +32 3 201 1555 www.rubenshuis.be -Rockox House Keizerstraat 10-12 Tel. +32 3 201 9250 www.rockoxhuis.be Hotels - De Witte Lelie Keizerstraat 16 Tel. +32 3 226 1966 www.dewittelelie.be - Hotel Julien Korte Nieuwstraat 24 Tel. +32 3 229 0600 www.hotel-julien.com Eating - Graanmarkt 13 www.graanmarkt13.be

MAS museum

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Many of the Antwerp Six came from art backgrounds and so had a different perspective on fashion, often using obscure references to marry the worlds of art and design.

– but once, it was the most opulent jewel of the Low Countries.

Dries Van Noten store

measure women’s clothes.

In times past, even more so than now, clothing was a key part of a household’s wealth. Exemplifying Antwerp tradition, the Vrijdagmarkt, tucked behind ModeNatie, has sold second-hand clothes and goods for almost 500 years. These markets housed tailors who specialised in adjusting garments or in “turning” them to expose their less-worn fabric and hide the worn parts. On the upmarket side, Vrijdagmarkt 6 is a store specialising in menswear from Antwerp designers like Raf Simons, Dries Van Noten, Kris Van Assche (Dior Homme) and Ann Demeulemeester, with otherworldly window displays provided by fashion students.

The epicentre of the Antwerp fashion scene is the Nationalestraat district, headed by Dries Van Noten’s multi-storey flagship, Het Modepaleis (The Fashion Palace).

You can find clothes by other veterans like Dirk Van Saene, as well as by up-and-coming Belgian designers, but the thing about Antwerp today is that the scene here is very international. Although

the fashion hub was kicked off and made a roaring success by nationals, today its offerings are by no means confined to local names, but include labels from everywhere. Antwerp is above all a great place to shop for items with individual flair, from anywhere in the world.

In a sense, all this is just a return to the city’s origins. Antwerp first made it big in the Middle Ages as the hub of the European trade in wool, the period’s crucial clothing material. Flanders was then also a centre of excellence in the making of tapestries, lace and embroidery.

Textiles became a major industry and Antwerp was renowned in the Renaissance for its master tailors.

Numerous wholesale clothing workshops were to be found in the city up until the early twentieth century, when the textile industry entered a period of decline (although this reversed in the 1980s when Antwerp’s young designers heralded a new golden age for the clothing business). Outshone in its region today by the much bigger capital cities of Brussels and Amsterdam, Antwerp has a relatively low profile

Antwerp’s Golden Age Northern Europe’s main trading seaway, located some 80 kilometres from the North Sea, Antwerp sat beside the broad and deep River Scheldt in Flanders, the richest region of northern Europe in the Middle Ages, with Bruges its leading city. But then Bruges’ river began silting up and shipping switched to Antwerp, so much so that by the late 14th century it had become the most important trading and financial centre in all of Europe. By the mid-16th century, the historian Fernand Braudel affirms, Antwerp was “the centre of the entire international economy.”

“Antwerp has God to thank for the Scheldt, and the Scheldt to thank for everything else,” is a local saying which rings as loud and true as the carillon of 49 bells in the Cathedral of Our Lady’s 123-metre tall tower which now rose above the city. The river brought the riches of the world and made the wealth of the city.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, as it became a Spanish possession and received the riches of the Americas and the Indies in its port,

Antwerp lived a Golden Age. Galleons came loaded with silks, spices, sugar and silver. Its great merchants built sumptuous guild houses on the main market square of Grote Markt – their gilded opulence is still to be seen today – and its bankers did great business with clients throughout Europe, including royal courts. Master artists flocked to the city to get commissions from rich patrons, adorning great churches with powerful works of art, and Antwerp was described as “the loveliest city in the world.”

However, in the late 16th century came a tragic fall. Fierce politicoreligious struggles prompted an exodus of money, talent and energy to Amsterdam, which was free from Spanish repression, sparking the Dutch port city’s phenomenal age of riches. Visiting Antwerp in 1619, an Englishman called James Howell described the profound change that 279 had befallen it. “This goodly ancient city, methinks, looks like a disconsolate widow, or rather some superannuated virgin that hath lost her lover, being almost quite bereft of that flourishing commerce wherewith [previously] she abounded to the envy of all other cities and marts of Europe.”

Nevertheless, as is often the way, just as Antwerp declined economically it entered a cultural high, becoming renowned for its master painters such as Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens and Teniers, and for its superb book printers such as Plantin and Moretus.

Today you can get a real sense of this era by visiting the Rubens House.

Lasting cultural legacies Antwerp’s cultural heart beats at the house where its most illustrious son, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), lived and worked throughout the second half of his life. Beyond a Flemish façade, this Italianate palace with reconstructed period rooms gives you a good idea of the lifestyle of a patrician gentleman of that time and place. The leading Baroque artist of his day, and surely the most productive, Rubens amassed a tidy fortune from

MoMu is a must-see for anyone interested in fashion, a dynamic modern space with exhibits drawn from a collection of 25,000 fashionrelated items, historical and contemporary.

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Courtyard at Ruben’s House

his paintings that allowed him to build this impressive mansion in his early thirties. In this palatial setting he created the lion’s share of his vast body of work aided by a small army of assistants. Hugely famous in his own time, recognised throughout Europe as a great master, Rubens entertained Europe’s nobility and royalty in this house, where paintings by him and his contemporaries are displayed along with many domestic items.

Another glimpse of the period is provided by the home of a 17thcentury mayor of Antwerp, Nicolaas Rockox, a patron and friend of Rubens and other artists. A treasure trove of the period, the Rockox House is adorned with paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens and others, and 16th- and 17th-century furniture and décor.

Already fading, the last straw for Antwerp came with the closure of the

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Scheldt to shipping by the Dutch, whose territory surrounded the Scheldt estuary, a political ploy which brought economic disaster.

The city went into steep decline, slumping to little more than a market town by the 1800s. Only when the river was reopened to shipping in 1863 did Antwerp begin to rise again, gradually building toward its current prosperity as the second largest port in Europe, the world hub for uncut diamonds, and a centre for fashion design.

This history is brilliantly presented in all its facets at a spectacular new museum that is a stand-out feature of the riverside.

You need to see the Scheldt and its port to get the full feel of Antwerp, and visiting MAS (Museum Aan de Stroom) is a great way to do it while getting a stimulating insight into the city’s history. Ten storeys high, built in a zig-zag pile of red brick and glass walls, MAS has staggering panoramic views of the city, the river and the port from its rooftop terrace. Inside, imaginative multi-media displays tell

the story of Antwerp past, present and future.

Also on the MAS premises is the Diamond Pavilion, illustrating Antwerp’s role as a leading centre for trade in diamonds and displaying sparkling samples of the product.

Active in the diamond trade since the 15th century, today more than 85 percent of the world’s rough diamonds, 50 per cent of cut diamonds and 40 per cent of industrial diamonds are traded in this city. In addition, countless diamond jewellers are based in the diamond district located around Centraal Station – which happens itself to be an architectural jewel.

This colossal train station is most visitors’ introduction to the city, and their last great sight as they leave, a vast cathedral of a terminus that arose in an eclectic jumble of styles at the turn of the 20th century, an elaborate statement of the city’s rediscovered faith in itself. This is a faith which in the 21st century sees Antwerp hailed, somewhat to its own phlegmatic Flemish surprise, as one of Europe’s most fashionable cities.

photo: ©corbis / profile

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trendy Cities Paris, London, New York and Milan may rule the fashion roost, but catwalk rivals around the world are fast emerging.

Here are three contender cities worth a look.

Shanghai Shanghai just sashayed past Tokyo and Hong Kong to become Asia’s top fashion city, at least on people’s lips. According to Global Language Monitor, a firm that tracks trends in word usage, Shanghai ranks tenth worldwide, fashionwise, and first in Asia.

“As China further emerges onto the world stage, Shanghai leads the fashion charge,” a spokeswoman said. Chinese brands were given a boost in 2013 after China’s new first lady Peng Liyuan wore Made-in-China outfits throughout her first foreign tour, including a bag, coat and scarf by the Exception label, and local brands now feature in the biannual Shanghai Fashion Week.

So now when you bowl along the Bund, Shanghai’s classic waterfront, or flounce through the French Quarter, the city’s most elegant district, know that you are in Asia’s fashion pinnacle. Look down upon the burgeoning cityscape of China’s commercial capital from its latest ultra-high-rise, the 632-metre Shanghai Tower, tallest building in Asia and the second-tallest in the world.

Wear chiffon or net to match the tower’s semitransparent cladding, which twists and spirals upward in a spectacular wind-deflecting form.

Berlin Berlin bursts with fashion: the official stats now give it 10 fashion schools, 800 fashion designers and 3,700 fashion companies.

Dubbed a “City of Design” by UNESCO, since 2007 Berlin has been staging fashion weeks each January and July, bidding to join the big girls of Paris, London, New York and Milan. Reviews have been mixed, but there’s no doubt that the German city has a fashion scene that is one of the world’s most watched.

Indeed, Berlin is a city that has been putting on adventurous new clothes ever since the fall of the Wall in 1989, and especially since it again became Germany’s political capital in 1999. The power and the money are back again, most conspicuously in the spectacular new Potsdamer Platz commercial and business complex that dominates the heart of the city near the iconic Brandenburg Gate.

Innovative style shoppers, gallery-goers and bar flies, however, head to Mitte district and its new fashion and art hub around Torstrasse, with shops like Soto and Konk for women and A D Deertz for men. During Fashion Week a street festival pops up there with makeshift bars and DJs pumping out international beats.

Los Angeles If there’s an image of Los Angeles that nails the city alongside the inescapable Hollywood and its stars, it’s Rodeo Drive, where the stars shop.

Long a shopping paradise for international designer brands, with movie stars pulling up in their Ferraris and Porsches, Rodeo Drive is increasingly home to local designer brands, as LA etches a name for itself as a fashion city, with labels like Rodarte, Jenni Kayne and Band of Outsiders. And snipping and sewing too are the movie costume designers, the heirs to Edith Head.

If you’re not a star, what do you do? You chase them. You take a studio tour which shows you round the sets and sound stages.

You take a bus tour to gawp at the stars’ homes in Beverley Hills and Bel Air. You follow their traces along the brass star-s tudded sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard. You try to join the stars as an unpaid movie extra via Be In A Movie.

You get audience tickets for a game or talk show at a TV-show factory like CBS Television City. Stay up for The Late Late Show, in person.

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