My Tailor is Rich

You might be wondering how we’ve been keeping ourselves busy for all those evenings. I do, after all, get out of work fairly early by European standards (5 pm!), and Bangkok is known as the city that never sleeps… Yet we haven’t done anything fancy, no. We have actually spent all, by which I mean ALL our evenings at tailor shops.

Brian needs a whole set of suits for work, I need an evening gown for my sister’s wedding, Brian needs shirts, I need shoes… Bangkok is known as one of (or THE) best value-for-good-tailoring destinations in the world. Like Hong Kong twenty years ago. But the rub is, financial cost is not everything. The cost in time and energy is quite a bit higher,especially for neophytes like ourselves. Our life has been an endless string of searching, trying, bargaining, shopping, fittings, and searching again.


The whole Bangkok tailor thing is not as easy as you might think: first, there are trillions of tailors in Bangkok, and our preferred guidebooks wisely warned us about all kind of scams, tricks and other entourloupes (sorry, I don’t know the English equivalent). So we looked at length for online recommendations, asked my colleagues at work, and sauntered into random shops. In the end, with the plethora of recommendations canceling each other out (or being outside the price range), Brian settled on a random shop that looked good.

Also, they didn't have someone outside hustling us, and their door says welcome in, like, six languages.

Then the real hard part begin: what kind of fabric? What color? What pattern?

C’mon, all these fancy shades of grey to choose from! Choosing a suit is a lot of fun… You’d never imagine you can spend so much time discussing something that will end up, anyway, looking grey and conservative – I mean, a suit.


But the result was definitely worth it: Brian’s ready to rock!


Then it was my turn. We toured a good four or five places before we found a small but fancy shop at the other end of town, just to make sure our life was really complicated. Good thing was, I had a little more freedom than for a suit: all the colors, the fabrics, the shapes... . So after much hesitation, flipping through haute-couture magazines, trying to picture myself looking natural in a copy of Ungaro or Christian Lacroix dress, I settled for something a little more local in hand-woven Thai silk.


You have to imagine that each of these (and I spared you the shirts, in a third tailor shop, at yet another end of the city) takes two to three fittings, so that we ended up spending hooouuurs in public transportations - skytrain, boats, buses, etc. - and got lost a couple of times too.


To wrap up our shopping craze, we did something a little more fun on Saturday and went to Chatuchak weekend market: thousands of stalls, selling everything from bronze Buddha to fighting cocks and birds, house utensils and jewelry.

Necklaces from not-so-precious stones made-to-order

and some colorful lights to cheer up our little shoebox of an apartment.