The traffic is jammed as ever, at the same red-light square I have passed more than a hundred times. The clouds are dark, as expected from the final stretch of the tropical rainy season, before the first winds come.
And then — glancing out of the left window of my car — I saw a man.
Late middle age. Likely working as a security officer. But probably the coolest one I have ever seen.
A clean, dark navy double-pocket shirt-jacket, close to a British colonial officer model. Matching-fabric pleated trousers with plain hems. Layered over it, a short coat worn open — four pockets, utility cut, perhaps polyester. Chunky black leather boots.
He walked past my window with a cigarette in hand, letting the smoke vanish into the cloudy air.
That sight stayed with me.
Not because smoking under a grey sky is cool by nature. Because of the naturalness, the ease, within the man himself.
None of his gestures, none of his clothes, signalled any attempt at anything. And every piece he wore had a context supporting it. His job as an officer. The wind. The chance of rain — which made a utility short coat the obvious layer rather than a chosen one.
Which made me realise something. This man was not a style icon from Pinterest, or from a curated Instagram feed. And yet he embodied the exact quality I cherish in individuals.
Elegance.
The comparison I cannot get out of my mind is the first moment I landed in Milan back in last February. A car from Malpensa into the city, luggage dropped, and then walking the city for the first time in a black Prada fine worsted-wool jacket, a silk knit tie, calfskin JM Weston tassel loafers.
That was the first time I felt tremendous ease wearing full tailoring. The first time I felt I belonged to the environment around me.
Half a year back in Bangkok now, after that voyage to Lombardy, I had come to believe that tailoring — or any unconventional clothing — has no real place in this city. That the state of elegance is simply not achievable here.
That man, in his utility short coat, walking and smoking and living his life, made me think differently.
Elegant can describe an object. A jacket, a shirt, a cardigan, a dress, a suit — each can be made in an elegant form, on its own terms.
But worn on a body, the craftsmanship and the fabric and the details will not do the whole work. It is the individual who wears the clothes, not the clothes that wear the individual. Which means two further factors come into play:
Person. And context.
When I saw the man in his security-guard ensemble, layered with that four-pocket water-repellent coat, I saw something believable.
Among the concrete walls, the uneven footpaths, the unpredictable monsoon sky, the humid but breezy air — everything he wore was aligned with the environment. He works here. He lives here. He stays here, as part of an ordinary life in a city called Bangkok.
There was no contradiction in the sight — in other words — ‘frictionlessness’.
That is the thing — the alignment between a person’s own nature and the surroundings they move through.
And it is perhaps why a full tailoring ensemble, here in Bangkok, rarely produces the effect it produces in the continental cities.
Which led me to a realisation that seems largely overlooked within the sphere of style discernment, and among people who want to dress better:
Some ordinary local people are the best style inspiration available to you.
The problem is that the style-inspiration images on Pinterest and in Instagram feeds are almost all seen through the lens of the major-city archetypes. New York. Milan. Paris. London. Tokyo. And directly copying the visual cues from a perfectly curated pose taken in one of those cities will rarely give you the same outcome in your own.
Each city, each environment — beyond climate — carries its own approach to lifestyle, to values, to tempo. All of it reflected, automatically, in how a person puts their clothes on each day. So look at how locals dress. Not everyone will give you something. But more of them will than you imagine.
The security guard in his short coat. A creative kid in barrel-silhouette jeans with white socks and leather mules. Someone upper-middle-class wearing the Polo Ralph Lauren pony so convincingly that Ralph’s world transcends its continent entirely.
The biggest matter, in my own case, remains this:
How to integrate context, and my own aficionado’s love for tailoring — which is clearly a language of the Western world — into a balance between the inner self and the outer world. And to arrive, finally, at that frictionless ease.
That elegance I keep looking for and it is still something to be experimented with.
Refined.
Developed further.
Perhaps for a very long time.