The Artist Crafting Fantastical Headpieces From Watches, Seashells and Stuffed Animals

“Wearable art” is a label applied with some abandon in the fashion world, but there’s no other way to describe the creative director Eric Tobua’s astonishing, often skyscraping headpieces. The Bangkok-based 39-year-old’s wild constructions have included a crown of snake and pig bones; a hat made from a stuffed-animal skunk; and a 2018 piece he calls “Hungry for Love, Hungry for Everything,” a headdress from which dangle plastic and resin replicas of bubble tea, ice cream and mango sticky rice. His massive helmet of fake luxury handbags and jewelry — titled “We Buy Things We Don’t Need With Money We Don’t Have to Impress People We Don’t Like” (2020) — is, he says, a commentary on consumerism and waste, topics he has also addressed with a series of fast-decomposing masks, one made of durian (a notoriously pungent fruit native to Southeast Asia) and another from okra and bitter gourd.

A native of Khon Kaen, a northeastern province of Thailand, Tobua studied ballet as an undergraduate before moving to London to enroll in the art and design program at Central Saint Martins. After earning his degree, he was a stylist’s assistant in Bangkok, where one of his first assignments was to craft runway accessories for a local fashion show. His creations — in particular a sprawling, spiky headpiece reminiscent of a lionfish and made from plastic straws, ostrich feathers and scraps of leather — led to commissions from musicians and television shows, including the Thai version of “The Masked Singer.”

Today, his clients are mostly international: To celebrate the opening of a show by the Spanish painter Miquel Barceló, the Fondation Beyeler museum, outside of Basel, Switzerland, hosted a gala for which Tobua’s friend the Paris-based Thai chef Rose Chalalai Singh created the menu and Tobua made hundreds of seashell-adorned crowns and hats topped with papier-mâché fish for guests to wear, many with collected objects found along the beaches of Majorca, where Barceló was born. Like Barceló, Tobua often turns to marine life for artistic inspiration. His fantasy project, he says, would be “an artistic message sent from the ocean.” One idea: an underwater sculpture that would evolve into a marine habitat. Says Tobua, “I dream of coral reefs growing upon my work.” — John Wogan

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