On Silhouette
The Untold Bridge Between Identity, Culture, and the Daily Act of Dressing
Since coming back from Milan and laying low in the tropical metropolis of Bangkok for a while now, I have begun to genuinely enjoy the act of putting on clothes more, on a daily basis, than I ever did before.
Previously, I used to believe that this city did not match the level of sophistication of the heritage capitals of Europe — at least within my own preferences and my advocacy for the classic register.
If you cannot quite imagine the level of difference, I will tell you this: whenever you put on a tailored jacket here — yes, the kind with proper lapels, construction, and structured fabric — no matter how casual the rest of your ensemble may be, you will automatically be dressing above the norm.
The perception is perfectly understandable.
Bangkok is an oriental culture, not a continental one — and it is no wonder that jackets, dress shoes, and leather footwear are far from the typical sights of day-to-day life. For most of Bangkok’s history — and the city has only existed in its present form for roughly a century and a half — the Western aesthetic ideal has been operative only for about the last hundred years.
The style you might see in the archives of 1800s London, or 1900s Paris, was certainly not what the civilians of Bangkok were wearing — not even during the mid-century. (Social parties and business were usually the only contexts in which someone in 1960s Bangkok would put on a suit or evening wear.)
However, my recent approach to dressing here — and likely in Paris this coming autumn — has begun to overcome that asynchronous dressing language: between the modern and the old world, between the oriental and the continental.
Which has led me to the single component rarely talked about, or deeply discussed, in any fashion publication or by any style writer:
Silhouette — and how it connects with identity, with cultural register, and with the ability to achieve elegance regardless of how different the clothes you are wearing may be from what the people in your city, in the current era, are wearing.
It is, in short, the term that gives you access to a genuine personal approach to style.
