"Fancy a trip to the Singapore Fashion Festival?" My gnarled editor swiveled around from the Mac and shot me a grin. "This looks like a junket."
Flights, a room at the Grand Hyatt and a limo for the weekend -- not bad. And all they'll want are a few complimentary paragraphs.
A week later, DHL delivered my air ticket.
Next day, I am bound for Narita. My ticket says Class: Y. If I remember correctly, "Y" is pretty far down the alphabet. I hope it stands for something rather loftier. After being ushered to the right upon boarding, I decide it's the "Y" at the end of "ignominy." No, wait, it's the "Y" in, "Y are you staring at me like that? Leopard spots are a key print this season!"
The first significant event of my junket occurs an hour into the flight when the guy in the seat directly behind me sparks up a cigarette. It's music to my nostrils, but heads turn and mothers tut-tut. I twist round to high-five the guy but he looks like a village idiot. A stewardess ticks him off and reminds him of the 500,000 yen fine. His wife is mortified but he just smirks mindlessly, says nothing and stubs it out after a few puffs.
I've never been to Singapore before, but I know its reputation for being squeaky clean and no fun -- no smoking, no chewing gum. I take time to scribble down the two main reasons why it is not, and will never be, a fashionable city.
The first and most fundamental reason is the same as why Californians have such bad dress sense: It's too hot to wear proper clothes. Forget layering, forget leather, forget hats.
Secondly, fashion is about sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll -- and Singapore ain't got much of any of that.
What it does have, I'm led to believe, is an abundance of rules and restrictions on personal freedom -- hardly the makings of a hotbed of creative fashion genius. No edginess, no rebelliousness, no "cool" where I'm going.
Nobly, I decide to reserve judgment and keep an open mind. I will seek out the cool in the tropical climes of Singapore.
Clinical, uptight city
We touch down just after midnight and I'm off the plane and looking for the smoking area. I'm forced to ascend three flights of stairs before stepping out onto a rooftop patio set aside for slaves to nicotine. There is a large contingent of Arab guys in their white thobe robes, the uniformity of which strikes me as a powerful anti-fashion (and anti-individualist) statement.
I get my fix and I'm out of the airport. There's my name held up on a piece of card -- very junket -- and I'm heading to the limo with Sam, my driver. We speed down a highway into central Singapore and I stare out at the city lights. Sam seems like a nice guy and the Benz is a good ride. I look up and see a neon sign for the French hypermarket Carrefou -- its "r" is out. Maybe this isn't such a clinical, uptight city as it's made out to be, I muse.
I install myself at the Hyatt and in the comfort of my (smoking) room nod off to visualizations of the following day's fashion festivities.
My junket guide, Joyce, is two hours late to meet me. Lateness is a sure sign of cool and my hopes are high. But when Joyce arrives she is not cool. She is a slight woman with short, side-parted hair and a plain shirt tucked into flared jeans. Not quite the powerdressing PR lady I had envisioned.
It's drizzling outside as she leads me to the main tent and the first show of my tour. Drizzle is gritty and cool, but the show turns out not to be. It's the "Singapore Women's Weekly Lingerie Awards," and I watch a gaudy display of skimpily clad models show off next to nothing from a mezzanine at the end of the catwalk. Seated beside me is an officious Australian scanning the crowd for spectators taking photos (which is of course against the rules) and directing three burly security guys with earpieces to go and tick them off.
Let me just explain the concept behind the Singapore Fashion Festival. It's an 11-day, consumer-targeted event with 90 percent of the tickets available for anybody to download from the Internet. It attracts all sorts of big sponsors including Mercedes, L'Oreal and Nokia, but is primarily the brainchild of the Singapore Tourism Board who use it as a vehicle to promote their free-port (i.e. no import duty) city as a destination for fashion shoppers.
Right. So after the lingerie parade I speak to Tara Barker, the editor of Singapore Women's Weekly who's a rather flustered English lady in an unappealing floral-print dress. She is quick to raise the two issues that singularly preoccupied most of the people I spoke to during my two days in Singapore: Can the city produce world-class designer brands? Can it become a center for fashion in Asia?
Tara isn't especially insightful, but one of her comments resonates. "In London," she says, "You're supposed to look a bit disheveled -- it means you're intelligent."
I dig relativism, and though that's not how they see it here, I'm pretty sure being a bit scruffy is a sign of being smart -- and cool.
But back to those two crunch questions.
The fact is that Singapore has already produced a couple of world-class designers, but they are both based in Europe. Andrew Gn had an abortive spell at the Paris couture house Balmain, but now regularly shows his own eponymous line there. London-based Ashley Isham makes party frocks for posh London ladies, including the odd aristo and celeb, and even has his own exclusive boutique.
The British Council invited Isham back to the city-state of his birth for this event where he showed alongside three other non-British designers who, after graduating from U.K. fashion schools launched successful pret-a-porter collections.
Isham's stuff isn't going to send any shockwaves through the rag trade, but it's fairly luxurious and executed with flair. Singaporeans are justly proud of his achievements, and are desperate to replicate his success in their hometown.
Can we do it?
From Tara to Sulian Tan-Wijaya -- head of Singapore Tourism Board's Tourism Shopping Division and the very pretty face of the Singapore Fashion Festival (she graced the catwalk on no fewer than three occasions) -- who honors me with a five-minute interview.
Straight out she asks: "So, do you think we can do it? Can Singapore become a fashion capital?"
"No," I shoot back, prompting a muffled snigger from a stylist I had just been chatting to.
The interview is pretty much all downhill from there.
The aforementioned stylist had been laboring under the impression that I was "available," but after sitting together through a few shows he figured that I was straight. Now, though, the night is just beginning, and he offers to introduce me to some friendly folks who'll be happy to take me out for a night on the tiles.
Kitty, a writer for the Financial Times, Marie, a brand manager, and local stylists Trey and Martin, proceed to drag me around Singapore's four best nightclubs. Kitty quaffs champagne, I get to dance with Miss Singapore and Marie repels the advances of a Mike Tyson lookalike while Trey and Martin flirt together. The music is kicking, the girls are super-hot (especially Miss Singapore) -- it's a good night. Maybe this city isn't so boring after all.
Next day, Sunday, I have more shows to go, more nice people to interview and a plane to catch. The catwalk presentations showcase the best of local talent, with eight brands on view and flashes of promise but nothing cohesive enough to write home about.
At the second group show I gossip with Lionel, another stylist who looks like a scrawny, Asian Adonis. "It's all so silly," he scoffs. "How can they possibly hope to compete internationally when there isn't even a garment industry here?"
There might not be a sweatshop infrastructure or big domestic brands, but Singapore loves fashion and it has put together a decent event to celebrate it. As Lionel says of his compatriots, "We're all harmless." I agree. I'm happy to be here. I like these people. They are cute, in every sense of the word.
The final show is another lingerie parade, this time from Triumph.
I'm sat next to a beefy skinhead. He's Danish, he tells me, and he's in electronic waste-recycling. "It's the new Fort Knox," he says; he gets half a ton of gold out of old PCs every month. Thallyta, a stunning model parading before us, is his girlfriend. She is Brazilian and not to be confused with the only other black model here, who's a Kenyan girl. I look at his fat Rolex, my own humble existence flashes before me, and I want to go home.
The show ends, I air-kiss Sulian and Joyce goodbye and slump into my Benz for the ride to the airport. Coming back on the same highway I came in on, I look up and see the Carrefour sign. It's been fixed -- overnight. Yes, folks, Singapore is a safe, clean city populated by attractive, friendly people and comes highly recommended as a city-break destination.
But it's got no edginess, no rebelliousness and a chronic paucity of cool. Needless to say, I'm thinking of moving there.