“No… No… No…” Embracing trends to survive and how to remain sane?
What Heidi’s Secret 20 years anniversary exhibition entails?
“The artist is a driver,” writes Robert Hughes, an important art critic. They drive the audience to where beauty lies. And here, let’s see the highlight of Heidi’s Secret 20-year anniversary art exhibition at Art4C gallery, Samyan Mitrtown. In the picture, I sat on a sofa, covered with rags and some flowers blooming from these piles of trash. It was inspired by the clothes of the homeless in Sydney (Timmy, Heidi’s Secret founder and designer, lives and travels back and forth from Sydney to Bangkok). It says so much about the brand’s DNA. Heidi’s and Timmy’s creativity derives from things that repelled him. To see the beauty of these rags, we require Timmy to bring us there, by his cutting and design, the aesthetics of this bleakness enter the world. I was talking to Rang Ittirit, a famous Thai photographer whose works are exhibiting in the exhibition, about “Aesthetics,” where beauty isn’t limited to just a pretentiously good form. Those who understand the idea of aesthetics can look beyond and talk about the feelings that an object actually entails and brings us to. “Like a chef, different ones bring different tastes to the same recipe, even if the formula is exactly the same,” says Rang.
When Pokchat Worasub, another renowned Thai photographer and curator of the exhibition, walked me through it, I had already spoken with Rang Ittirit the day before about his work, which is the first part of the exhibition. The photos feature a 20-year-old model wearing a 20-year-old design, one of the first pieces made by Timmy. The pattern is simple. To me, it has the feeling of coming straight out of a pattern book — classic, yet raw. Timmy himself told me that he wasn’t yet well-versed in cloth making, giving these garments a spontaneous feel. Rang employed no technique to make it even more spontaneous by taking a plain snap. “All good things are wild and free,” as Albert Camus said. I agree with Nan, the Art4C Gallery manager, who discerned that even though it is a snap, all components are sophisticated. True, it’s not a painting that requires hours of work, but it takes a photographer’s entire career to achieve this.
Then, Pokchat showed me her own works. They represent the time in the 2000s when Heidi’s moved from Siam to Ekkamai. Pokchat uses a lighting technique in Timmy’s own studio to invoke the soul of Amy Winehouse and her song “Rehab” — “No… No… No…”. The part of the song that captured Timmy’s sweet and lowdown roller coaster adventure during those times. To me, this “No… No… No…” can be the designer’s “No.” It can be a no to a variety of things. No artist would love to go to therapy or rehab if it meant the end of their creativity. It can also be “no” to the conglomerates’ practices that rule fashion. Bye-bye, art. An era of designers is long gone. Nowadays, most brands are run majorly by a business manager, minorly a hired designer. Yet, Timmy persevered to the present day, involving in all processes of making Heidi’s Secret.
Last is the work by John Tod, which makes me feel that, willingly or unwillingly, Heidi’s can be distorted by time. It preserves its unique DNA yet needs to expand and evolve. The key is “Cultural Relevance.” Tod uses 3D art in black to represent the brand’s genderless era, where it began to make clothes for all genders, ages, and ethnicities.
In the recent “Pessimist Issues,” the latest issue of “Spike Art Magazine,” I was struck by two columns which contain some relevant views to look at what I see as I moved to this state of mind that the exhibition has brought me to.
The first one is “Advertising,” an article by Madeline Cash, a brand strategist. Highlighted its line as:
“It’s tricky selling toothpaste in the apocalypse, especially to urban, woke, post-hipster consumers talking up the end of capitalism. So, ad campaigns are getting surreal, merging excess and social responsibility, irony and authenticity, showing they’re not just marketing products, but revolution.”
Such is a similar case to Heidi’s Secret, whose endeavor has to embrace the paradigm shift from a brand as a consumer’s lover to an activist. By becoming what it calls itself “Clothes with no gender,” it repositions itself to be “culturally relevant” to a large audience. It attempts to stay on top of its core consumers’ minds, the mass-prestige younger affluent buyers in Bangkok whose core cultural values shift towards gender diversity and inclusivity.
“It’s apocalypse arbitrage. We’ve transcended traditional marketing paradigms (buy ____ for you) for pseudo-altruism (buy ____ for you for them). A brand can’t just sell its products; it must sell a revolution.
The second is “A Polite No,” an article by Jeppe Ugelvig, a cultural critic based in New York, criticizing how fashion has become a mere set of corporate practices to conduct business.
If luxury fashion once offered a ladder up to visionary independents whether through hiring or simply buying them out, Pharrel’s Louis Vuitton appointment clarifies that era is over. The new precarity demands that upstart talent vary their tactics: a little corporate consulting, a little mooching off art, and thinking hard about whether to accept the corporate terms of what constitutes fashion.
Ugelvig proposes that
A polite “no” to corporate cool might be a first step: an acknowledgement that, despite the glitz budgeted by giants like LVMH and Kering, corporate aesthetics are, and will always be, thoroughly gauche. —
Not a toothpaste, Heidi’s Secret is clothes — fashion. Yet, any brand strategist would know that Benchmark Analysis can be conducted by borrowing key learnings and drawing inspiration from players across sectors. The same goes here with Heidi’s. The brand has done so much to strive and remain relevant in today’s market, its trends, perceived values, and preferred aesthetics. Simultaneously, it is visible in the way it communicates itself through products and brand images that it still tries to convey and search for its own distinctive voice.
Even though Amy Winehouse is not my type of music (I would go straight to Billie Holiday or Nina Simone to travel to a similar place in my soul the way Timmy does with his), the parts within oneself where this music leads prompt me to recollect when I was starting out in theatre. It was a time of spontaneity. I didn’t know much about what I was doing, yet there was so much hope. To describe it by a color, I would say it was as orange as Heidi’s vintage dress. I did it spontaneously, and it led me to many places, from a theatre troupe rehearsing under a tollway in Pleonchit, performing in any ugly empty spaces in the city, in Sukhumvit, Rajadamneon, Sampantawong, to Scala Theatre (which has now gone), Thonglor Art Space (which also is long gone), and all leading theaters. I then ventured to Paris and London. I remember being stuck in London’s lockdowns, going through the dark nights of my soul, contemplating giving up, listening to Billie Holiday’s “Solitude.”
“In my solitude you haunt me
With reveries of days gone by
In my solitude you taunt me
With memories that never die.”
These adventures sprung from the same place that repels me. I dislike myself, my life, my past, my talent, my love, my voice, the way I am, who I am. Yet, it’s the same force that makes me go… go… go…. I went all the way and all over the world to follow my dream. Sadly, a happy-go-lucky story doesn’t happen all the time and to everyone. To summon courage to go on while the world says no requires self-respect, the very thing Joan Didion wrote about in her famous Vogue column, “On Self-Respect.”
“To free us from the expectations of others,
to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great,
the singular power of self-respect”
Hegel says the essence of humanistic values is the ability to say no. That’s why the “No… No… No…” came up for the artist, to save his soul. And self-respect was somewhat something that I was keenly lacking. I then swallowed my own blood, having commoditized myself, forging a career on the corporate ladder. I have done so much to strive and remain relevant in today’s societal norm, its trends, perceived values, and preferred aesthetics. Exploiting myself from job to job, ignoring my artistic impulses, alienating my soul, developing migraines and back pains. But all this with the dim hope that one day I would be able to reunite with it. In my heart of hearts, I still want to be and feel like I am an artist.
With this theme of repelling things weaving through Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” lyrics: “No… No… No…,” this exhibition, for me, is about what truly matters in life. As time evolves and things revolve, how can you still make sense of a world that doesn’t make sense to you? How can you remain internally sane in an ocean of crap that pushes you to be culturally relevant (which you may or may not want to be)? How can you thrive and look back twenty years from now, knowing that you stayed true to your path? My take is that I would encourage myself to keep humming and saying “No… No… No…”.
