“When I originally started IWANNABANGKOK©, I just imagined it being like the ‘I Love New York’ campaign,” says Adisak Jirasakkasem, sitting in the office above his flagship store, with the BTS slinking by just outside the window behind him. “The phrase is so funny and sexual, it fits the city really well. But I wanted to change people’s perspectives by using the joke with creative and positive visuals. Foreigners have such a negative perspective. We have the sex tourism and everything here, but we have much more than that.”
Jirasakkasem, who goes by the nickname Beam, never expected to be producing full collections. The brand started as a logo and nothing more. “For the first two years, I was doing graphic tees but it never picked up,” he recalls of those early days beginning in 2013. He knew he had to do something different to catch people’s attention and landed on the idea of doing stencils around the city to get his name out there. When he met Supakorn Buaruan, his creative and life partner, they launched the guerrilla campaign in earnest. “That was what we did on our first date!” He says the brand wouldn’t exist without Buaruan and that when Jirasakkasem comes up with an idea, they talk it through and then make it happen.
For younger designers, Jirasakkasem thinks getting your name out there is as essential as having a good product. “You have to do anything to survive, to stay relevant. We started without a product, just graffiti,” he says. “I’ve met some very successful people who most people haven’t heard of. They’re not viral but are super rich. They tend to be older though.” Over the years, IWANNABANGKOK© has done everything from stencils, to creating a CGI model, to releasing attention-grabbing products like hulk-feet slippers and branded poppers.
Not that fame comes easy: “I started from scratch, I had zero followers. The growth was very slow and organic.” After a couple of years of painting stencils and posting street-style portraits of kids from around Bangkok on their Instagram, they started doing silkscreen prints on second-hand pieces. Originally the goal was to sell to tourists, but they realized it was the local kids who were drawn to the brand. “We did our first pop up and 90 percent of the sales were from Thai teenagers,” Jirasakkasem recalls.
IWANNABANGKOK© doesn’t rely on name recognition alone and has taken full advantage of every inch of notoriety they’ve accumulated. The first popular product that Jirasakkasem created was a fluffy cross-body bag in 2017. It sold well enough that he took that money and opened a pop-up in Icon Siam, selling a bunch of different stuff like simple t-shirts, secondhand pieces, and tote bags. After a few months, they moved the kiosk to centralwOrld. The goal there was also to appeal to tourists—since that’s the malls’ target audience—but a few weeks after they moved the pandemic hit, shutting them down almost immediately. Again, the tourists never materialized.
Jirasakkasem designed a white, fluffy IWANNABANGKOK© tote bag during the lockdown, which ended up on a popular “boy love” TV show in Thailand. “The genre is very popular among young Asian girls,” he says. “It’s powerful to see this type of relationship in the mainstream, I never thought it’d happen here.” The main character of the show is a boy from the south of Thailand who moves to Bangkok and he wears the tote. Soon after, the brand started getting wholesale orders from China.
The brand is very closely connected to the queer community, which makes up the majority of its fans, but Jirasakkasem views IWANNABANGKOK© as belonging to everyone. “From the start, I never wanted it to be for just for one community exclusively. Everyone should be equal,” he says. In the early days when they were shooting street-style portraits, he made it a point to include people from every gender and style. “Bangkok is very special in terms of diverse sexuality. You don’t see ladyboys walking around in everyday life in many other places.” By embracing this diversity, the brand naturally became a part of the LGBTQ community. “Many brands do this, but it’s only for the PR. We just do it because we want to, because it’s who we are. We want to show what’s going on.”
IWANNABANGKOK© dropped another bag during the pandemic, this time a Louis Vuitton knockoff-inspired boxy bag. It went viral in China after an influencer there posted it online, leading to even more wholesale orders. People were wearing it during Shanghai Fashion Week. “We didn’t know what was going on,” Jirasakkasem laughs. The success of the bag led them to create their first real collection, using the LV-style print on polyester and white denim fabrics. “When you print on polyester it’s much more vibrant but the denim fades nicely when you wash it.” Last week someone from the Louis Vuitton creative team was wearing at an LV event in Hong Kong, giving the piece another late boost. Unfortunately, IWANNABANGKOK© received a stop-and-desist letter and can’t use the print anymore.
The brand has continued to growing this year, gaining recognition beyond Thailand and China. They’ve been covered by multiple Japanese outlets and they’ve been working in Vietnam as well. IWANNABANGKOK© recently appeared at a pop-up with Saigon brand OBjoff and they did an editorial spread with Vietnamese photographer Nguyễn Anh Hào that appeared in Berlin magazine Sicky. Jirasakkasem says he wants to focus on more collaborations in Southeast Asia to help the creative scene expand here. “We’re not a rich region, so it’s harder to grow. I want us to support each other because there’s a lot of potential but not as many opportunities.”
IWANNABANGKOK© also started producing clothes themselves in a studio above the storefront. Their most recent line, a sportswear collection based on a t-shirt from a few years ago with bold, geometric stitching, was produced entirely in-house. The shift was born out of necessity because the factory minimum was too high, and it was more affordable to just buy machines and make the pieces themselves. But it fits their personality better in the end. “We can do a lot of different designs, it’s so much more creative,” Jirasakkasem gushes. “It’s more fun. You can design it today and see the prototype tomorrow. You can fix it right away too. Everything we do is quick, we usually only work a month ahead. Our team would lose a lot of our hype if we worked six months ahead.”
