EXCERPTS FROM INTERVIEW WITH SHONE PUIPIA
Founder and Creative Director of SHONE PUIPIA and SOI SAM
Founder and Creative Director of SHONE PUIPIA and SOI SAM
Born into a family of visual artists, Shone Puipia’s earliest memories are tinted with paints and paper.
“I grew up with their studio in the house, playing around with their materials, going to openings, galleries and art shows. I was always encouraged to make art and create things.”
However, he knew early on that the visual arts weren’t quite his path. “It felt like it wasn’t me.” It wasn’t until high school when he started taking weekend classes at the Alliance Francaise learning patternmaking and draping that he fell in love with the craft of making clothes, transforming something from two-dimensional to three-dimensional.
“That’s how it started, through making and learning the craft.”
Shone’s master’s collection titled The Wild Bunch took inspiration from the 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock and was his verion of an alternative ending to the story, asking the question of where the girls could’ve ended up. There are threads and pieces from his work in school that still manifest now, but he works much less thematically nowadays, focusing more on research into garments, colours and shapes.
Shone graduated in 2016 and launched his namesake label shortly after.
“What I do for the brand, I see it as a growing wardrobe from the very first collection. It’s chapters of these characters, it builds on one another and grows. There is a thread that runs through in terms of colour and material use. But it’s getting more and more refined, offering different sides of the Shone Puipia person.”
It wasn’t always Shone’s plan to start a brand right away. After graduation, he returned to Thailand to prepare for an exhibition at Chiang Mai’s Maiiam Contemporary Art Museum, a retrospective of his four years in Antwerp. That exhibition became the springboard for establishing his brand and an introduction to the fashion community in Thailand.
In 2018, he launched his studio and showroom called Soi Sam to house the brand. It was the type of space that had never existed in Bangkok before, “a place where you can discover a designer’s world and see the process and the people who are making the clothes.”
The landscape of fashion in Thailand, once dominated by hierarchy and this notion of “the old guard” is changing. “They’re making room for new blood” according to Shone. But he admits it took time for him to get acquainted with the community. “I wasn’t working the same way most brands were doing, we were doing it at our own pace. We were setting up new way of producing and showing.”
“I’m a very tactile person, I love working with materiality,” says Shone. In fashion nowadays it’s hard to bring something new to the table, but Shone finds that he can make a difference in his innovation with textiles, finding new techniques and trying new combinations of materials.
Though trained in European craftsmanship, Puipia’s sensibility is adapted to suit the context he is in now.
“The training that I got in Europe, learning that craft of garment making in the European way, it still speaks a lot in my world and the way we construct things. But in Thailand its more relaxed, there’s something more fun in the Asianness, it’s a casual glamour.”
His shapes are not complicated, there is something minimal in them. It’s more about finding a fresh way of constructing them or a new use of fabric that makes it an easy elegance that is wearable.
Trained and taught in Bangkok, his team share his meticulous ethos. In order to produce at the highest level, he doesn’t compromise on that. Now that he has interns from universities, it’s a good chance to instill these values in younger people.
“I hope that shows through in our work, it’s something very important to me, the value of good garment making and craftsmanship.”
SEE FULL STORY IN ARTIFACT ISSUE N°1