This combination of food,fashion and shopping has evolved organically into a hybrid that's proliferating further and further across the Bangkok urban landscape - the boutique/cafe and shop/restaurant.
The best of these concept stores take shape in the form of purpose-built spaces. At the forefront of the genre are four business-savvy brands who recognized the potential in melding shopping with eating before it became a trend.
Ahead of curve is Greyhound ,which has been operating as a fashion brand since 1980. Over the years, the label has expanded to include other lines: Playhound, Hound&friends. Animal House and the latest collaboration with The Mall Group. Project 1.1 you would imagine that multiple sub-brands would be enough to manage, but in 1997, director Bhanu Inkawat decided to branch out literally into the food businesses.
Greyhound Café was one of the first eateries with a signature fusion menu, with a creative concept it's sister label's motto: "Basic with a Twist. " People expecting the good taste exhibited in Greyhound's designs to be reflecting in its food found the proof in the pudding. The business has since expanded with more food outlets and spin-off brands:
Another Hound, Sweet Hound and now Ground-Hey by Greyhound café in Hong Kong.
Another label to offer a branded dinning-and-shopping experience is Boyy. For the past eight years. Boyy has distributed their now iconic bags throughout the world to celebrity clients such as Chloe Sevingny, French model Lou Doillon and Sarah Jessica Parker. The label's name derives from the nickname of the owner. Wannasiri Kongman, a New York fashion alumna.
Last year, Boyy opened a new store and restaurant in Soi Thonglor 10 called Boyy Café. The café is a flagship store for label with a restaurant on the ground floor and a handbag showroom upstairs. The interior of the store is a combination of grey and black, which makes use of the warm textures and colours of weathered wood, with shiny metal and cool marble coming together to create an industrial "New York" look. This repeat the aesthetics of Boyy's bags-a distinctive combination of textures: smoked steel, soft leather, snake skin, calf hair and stingray. This aesthetic also translated into the food offered at the café: comfort food with familiar homemade tastes, accentuated by a personal touch.
The minimal style of Greyhound and Boyy café sit in stark contrast to brands such as It's Happened to be a Closet, a colourful Aladdin's cave of bold ethnic prints, layered silhouette, vintage hand-embroidery and detailed one-offs.Digging for a treasure is a Thai national sport when it comes to shopping, and It's Happened To Be A Closet is a boon for bower birds. It's Happened started as a boutique called It's Happened to be a Closet: the Nero off the Khoa San Road in and old two-story, Addams Family - style mansion painted in black. In Bangkok they now have two boutiques: one a stand-alone shop in Siam Square and another at Emporium. The store offer gourmet Italian Food and a salon providing treatments, as well as racks and racks of clothing. It's doesn't take much analysis to understand why gourmet food and luxury fashion go so well together. Both are indulgences that sate our needs yet make us yearn for more. Both also affirm our appetite for life.
Fashion, when juxtaposed against food, put the latter in a style context - elevated form a necessary to and art form with personality and fair. Food, on the other hand, gives fashion abstract textures and adds flavours to the visual and textural elements. The mind leaps to the Lady's Gaga meat dress as an extreme example of food meeting fashion arts, eliciting a visceral response.Then there are "fashion shows" for food, such as those for the Salon du Chocolate festival in Belgium, where elaborate women's ensembles are made entirely of chocolate. As a team, food and fashion have strength to ignite our senses far more profoundly than they can separately.
Some see the marriage of fashion and food as a contradiction . How can food be a good match for fashion when the prerequisite in most cultures for being fashionable is being slim? This tension can inspire great art.