Our man in Asia has sent some images and observations from one of Bangkok’s new malls. Malls are a big damn deal there. When I was in SE Asia this past New Year’s season, a Thai newspaper wrote a story about the ten most important things that had happened that year—a mega-mall opening in Bangkok was on the list. (The enormous protests, during which thousands of people “calling for the overthrow of the Thai government” clashed with police, were not.)
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- Soldiers of fashion.
As Bangkok develops more and more in to a tropical version of Tokyo—in affluence and just plain simulated weirdness—megastore owners have been branching out to make themselves not just places to buy, but to have an experience. It is not the product that is the commodity, it is the process of buying the product.
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- This is a real person, getting paid to make like a mannequin.
Terminal 21 is a mall in Bangkok that I would have loved to have heard the pitch for. The salesperson who put this over was a genius. The idea behind the place is that the mall looks like it is an airport terminal with eight floors.
So, on the top floor, for example, your arrival gate is Los Angeles (or rather Hollywood.) This floor has the movie theaters and video games. Other cities are Tokyo, Rome, Paris, Istanbul, London and San Francisco, which confusingly has two floors.
In the basement is—and it is hard not to read a Thai prejudice against darker skin in to this—is “the Caribbean.” The higher one’s head is in this society, the more prestige. Thus, in movie theatres the more money you pay for a ticket, the further back and higher elevated you are.
I don’t think that the Caribbean in the basement is a coincidence, but on the other hand Istanbul is higher than Paris and Rome, so who knows?
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- The Terminal 21 mall.
On each floor, the signifiers of the city are, aside from convincing airport displays, usually other modes of transport. London has its double decker buses and Underground signs, Paris has the Metro stops, San Francisco has cable car tracks, bicycles and the Golden Gate Bridge there are Vespas in Rome and Istanbul has a Trojan horse (this is stretching, I know).
You are in a mall formed like an airport with cities on each level and to represent the cities they use other types of transportation. Is this how we classify ourselves—by how we get from place to place? Also, each floor’s
cleaning and security staff wears a stereotypical outfit of that region.
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- San Fran level.
This is an era of wonder, which future generations will hear stories of and not believe. With the complete domination of capitalism crowding out politics or philosophy or even religion as pastimes*, people need increasingly more exciting ways to shop. It is not the need of items to buy as much as the need to fill time. Not only do we have more people who have their basic needs met than at any other time in history, but this fulfillment has led to boredom and more creative ways to simulate and stimulate want.
*This is not entirely bad.
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- In through the out door.
And that’s the news from our man in Asia. (Coming in our next episode—visiting a police inspector’s museum in Laos.)
