Kwan has loved people-watching ever since his childhood in Singapore as part of an old-money family: his grandfather was the country’s first western-trained ophthalmologist, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Now the coffee shops of West Hollywood provide fertile ground for his observations, not least the endless women in skin-tone leggings and bra tops. (“It’s gone way beyond yoga, everyone looks like they are in medical undergarments.”)
While Kwan proves a vivacious conversationalist generally, it’s the foibles of fashion that really seem to animate him. (Although alongside laughing at the spectacle that is humans trying to look cool, he makes sure to add, “I hope you know that I am being tongue in cheek.”)
“When I think of a scene and a character walking into a room, I always think about what they’re wearing from head to toe . . . I actually keep folders of images of clothing and outfits for every single character and every single scene,” says Kwan. Some of the observations made when the action relocates to Beverly Hills are the most acute.
When the character Eden Tong, a down-to-earth young British-Asian doctor, comes to LA, she notes that “the rich kids all dress like old men and the old men dress like kids”. Is this something Kwan has clocked? “The rich Beverly Hills kids . . . they’re the ones in Loro Piana moccasins and cashmere cardigans . . . like impeccably dressed old Italian men. Their fathers are the CEOs, studio heads or moguls and they’re wearing camouflage shorts, sneakers or those bad Adidas slides. There’s a Peter Pan syndrome thing happening here in LA.”
Lies and Weddings also delivers a takedown of different LA watch tribes through wealthy heiress Daniela, who quips that “Oysters are for real estate brokers hawking overpriced houses in the Bird Streets [an LA celebrity enclave]. Nautiluses are for mid-level entertainment execs. Look at that guy in cargo shorts and flip flips over there — he’s not even wearing a watch.”
Kwan says that it’s the character talking, but that there is also some truth to her observation. Pondering the meaning of eschewing a watch, he ruminates that “the latest trend that I’m seeing amongst the 0.0001 per cent is not quiet luxury. It’s no luxury, it’s anti-luxury. It’s become the ultimate flex to be completely nondescript . . . Like, ‘I don’t even have to wear cashmere. I can go around in flip-flops, shorts and a Bermuda shirt, but I have the best yacht in the harbour down in St Barths’ . . . There is this sense of luxury fatigue.”
Kwan himself seems to identify with this luxury fatigue when it comes to megabrands, which he says “have become so boring”, and the kind of sumptuous holiday resorts that feature in Lies and Weddings.
