The first thing you see when you step inside IWANNABANGKOK’s flagship store in Si Lom is a towering golden sculpture of an alien goddess with three boobs, shiny skin, and a smug expression like she knows something about your fate. She’s wearing a gold bikini—obviously—and surrounded by coins, plastic pigeons, and a powder pink three-piece cake offering that looks like, well, three more boobs. She looks serene. Unbothered. Worshipped. The walls are tiled white like a space-age bathhouse, and the clothes hang from a balcony overhead like spiritual offerings. It feels part shrine, part stage set, part absurdist dream.
“This is the temple,” Beam tells me. Beam—full name Adisak Jirasakkasem—is the cofounder of IWANNABANGKOK, the underground Bangkok-based fashion label with a name that started as a party joke and became an entire universe. “This year is about the alien goddess,” he says. “The design came from one of our old T-shirts. A friend wore it and got hit by a car. She survived. So… we turned her into a goddess.” He shrugs. In Thailand, where people can be superstitious about everything from lottery numbers to amulets to which shirt you wore when disaster struck, this kind of logic feels inevitable.
IWANNABANGKOK is more than a fashion brand—it’s a world with its own belief system. Their HQ is a six-storey concrete building in Si Lom: the first three floors are the boutique, the top three house Beam’s studio, team workspaces, and a rooftop with a panoramic sweep of the city. The store feels minimalist at first glance—lots of concrete and scaffolding—but the clothes themselves are deeply maximalist: airbrushed tanks, silicone accessories, rope-braided bags, and garments printed with surreal religious motifs mashed up with aliens and body parts. Everything feels like it’s in on a joke you also feel spiritually invested in.
Upstairs, Beam shows me collaborative pieces made with artist friends: printed tanks by tattoo illustrators, sculptural jewelry, a soft peach-pink set inspired by monk robes. One of their most frequent collaborators is illustrator Burin Pong, whose cartoonish, fever-dream line work appears across tees, posters, and altar decor. They also work with artist and designer Nalin Chan, whose merch features the tagline “The Future is Ladyboy.” Beam’s boyfriend and cofounder Grofe (Supakorn Buaruan) has his own line too—Beam proudly shows me a pair of earrings made from repurposed Nintendo DS game cartridges.
The idea for the brand hit Beam at a party in Berlin. “Someone asked me where I was from. I said, ‘Bangkok.’ She said, ‘I wanna Bangkok.’ And I just saw it all. Right there.” At first it was just tank tops and street sales—he and friends carted the first 100 down Khaosan Road and managed to sell five. “I didn’t even like the logo,” Beam admits. “But I had to start somewhere.”
Since then, he’s evolved the brand into something with real mythology. IWANNABANGKOK doesn’t follow the usual spring/summer, autumn/winter fashion calendar—“It’s always hot here,” Beam shrugs. Instead, each year is built around a single theme, which unfolds in a series of chapters—drops, or “episodes,” as Beam calls them. Last year was “The Bath House”: a homoerotic, spa-coded fantasy of boy-love and steamy sweat. This year’s is “The Temple of the Alien Goddess”, a spiritual sci-fi tale told in four parts. “Each drop reveals more of her story,” Beam says. “We build it out like a series.”
There are printed tees and altar-like accessories, plus ya dom (the menthol inhalers Thai people carry religiously) designed in the image of the goddess. “So you can carry her in your pocket,” Beam says. “Breathe her in. Smell her farts. Whatever works.” They even collaborated with Thai ice cream specialist Kintaam to create a three-boob dessert inspired by her. “It’s like a mochi-cookie hybrid,” Beam says. “With jelly balls inside.”
That’s the thing about IWANNABANGKOK: it’s high-concept without trying too hard. Beam doesn’t explain everything, and he doesn’t need to. The ideas come from instinct, from humour, from whatever’s swirling around him—be it mochi ice cream, spiritual superstition, or a three-boobed T-shirt. The same goes for queerness. It’s not a strategy—it’s just who they are. “Our team is mostly queer because we are,” he says. “I’m gay. My boyfriend’s gay. My friends are gay. But the brand is for everyone.”
We toured the full building—screen-printing setups, storage rooms, racks of mesh tanks and soft shorts made for Bangkok’s eternal summer. “It’s always hot,” Beam says, holding one up. “You can’t fight it.” On the rooftop, he shows me the skyline, points out where the BTS Skytrain runs past, and talks about how the city has changed. “I used to not want to live here,” he says. “Now I do. There’s space here. There’s energy.”
Before I left, Beam told me they’ll be opening a second, smaller shop in the trendy shopping district of Siam later this year—something more central and easier for Thai customers to access. But this building, this space, will always be the heart. “You should check out Banthat Thong road,” he added, recommending a late-night street food spot known for seafood and sweet things.
I glanced back at the golden goddess, lounging in her shimmering bikini. I gave a small nod—as much to the goddess as to the world Beam built around her.
