Local Fashion

I noticed that in a big city such as Bangkok, the style in which people dress tends to be influenced by the West or if in the East, by countries such as Korea or Japan. This causes a loss of Thai identity. My project is all about trying to preserve the Thai ways and therefore I was interested in looking out for people who still dress in a way that expresses Thai identity. I started this project in 2010 in the Northern part of Thailand where I can still find people who are proud of dressing in their traditional clothes and not caring about fashion trends. As time went by this project has expanded, and now I'm also in search of ethnic people who are still wearing their traditional clothes in the contemporary society. The way I work is to have a backdrop ready and to have some people or my assistants, or even the subjects themselves, hold up the backdrop to set a stage. This is influenced by the style of colonial outdoor portrait photography. This extracts the subjects out of the context for a minute so we can see them as they are. In addition, we can also get a sense of place and time by studying what we can see behind the backdrop.