Before stepping onto a stage, Lisa – Thailand’s most celebrated export and the weapon in BLACKPINK’s arsenal – paused for a brief exchange with Louk Golf, the English tutor turned pop-culture fixture. He handed her a simple gift: a hand-woven bamboo fan, the words ‘ruay nat’ woven boldly across its surface. In the southern dialect, the phrase translates to ‘super rich’, a tongue-in-cheek blessing that doubles as a knowing wink to her global success. He added a message at once earnest and self-aware: ‘I will always be one of your biggest fans.’
It sounds almost too neat – the world’s most bankable pop star holding up a provincial handicraft – but Lisa’s career has been built on making such coincidences feel inevitable. She only has to pose with a toy or glance at a snack for it to become a trend. The Labubu doll, once a niche collector’s item, became an international obsession after she was seen cradling one. In the strange economy of fandom, her choices can swell into global movements. A woven fan from southern Thailand may be next.
The object itself is hardly glamorous. For generations, Thais used fans like these to stir flames in village kitchens or to fight the heavy heat of April afternoons. They were practical, cheap, unfussy. Bamboo, abundant and forgiving, was split into strips and threaded into shape. Patterns grew more elaborate over time but the purpose remained humble: something to keep the air moving. Now, by sheer accident of celebrity proximity, the fan has slipped into the category of soft power – cultural artefacts that travel not by trade negotiations but by charm.
The particular fan in Lisa’s hand came from Dasdnn, a small shop in Songkhla. The city itself is layered with ruins, shrines and a shoreline dotted with fishing boats, but Dasdnn leans away from postcards and into parody. Four friends opened it as a kind of anti-souvenir store, its interior styled like a village general shop. Their motto, ‘Something that is so common.’
Their catalogue speaks to this philosophy. Alongside bamboo fans in slang-splashed versions – ruay nat (super rich), yenn nat (super cool), bai jai nat (very happy) – they sell elephant pants refashioned as ‘mermaid pants’, socks patterned with mudskippers, and shrimp crisps cheekily labelled ‘mermaid meat’. There is satire at play, but also affection. In treating banality with reverence, they argue that culture is not locked inside temples or festivals but sprawled across the unremarkable.
The store sits between equally idiosyncratic neighbours: Nusantara, a record shop with ties to a beloved listening bar, and Grandpa Never Drunk Alone, a watering hole whose name alone feels like a short story. Together they form a pocket of Songkhla where nostalgia, humour and local identity intersect – a reminder that provincial cities, so often flattened into ‘heritage’ or ‘beach towns’, are far messier and more alive.
Lisa’s fan, then, is not just a meme in waiting but a bridge. It joins the handmade with the hyper-global, the village craft with the Instagram story. What Dasdnn attempts – reframing ordinariness as desirable – is exactly what her gesture achieved in a second. The image of her holding the fan elevates an object once confined to markets and kitchens into something worth coveting.
There is something faintly comic about the whole scene. A superstar whose choreography is dissected by millions holds up the very tool Thai grandmothers once used to keep mosquitoes at bay. Yet perhaps this absurdity is the point. Culture, at its liveliest, is rarely dignified. It spills from the street, the stall, the side alley. Dasdnn’s fans remind us that what we dismiss as mundane can resurface, with the right push, as emblematic.
What Lisa picks up next is anyone’s guess – another toy, a snack, perhaps a shirt bought off a roadside stall. But the fan already demonstrates how cultural currents can shift overnight. A small shop in Songkhla did not set out to conquer the global market, but its objects now travel further than its founders could have plotted. Fame and folkcraft collided, and for a moment the world looked at bamboo differently.