Funk from Junk

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Kitti Manoonphol, the dashing 31-year-old Thai jewelry designer whose outrageous creations appear on the necks and wrists of Thai princesses and reigning beauty queens (Miss Thailand and Miss World among them), is setting his sights on the wider world. And his latest collection (which can be viewed at kittijewelry.com) might just help him get there. "Contemporary ethnic arts," the phrase adopted by Kitti to describe his latest work, barely does justice to his audacious combination of ancient bead-working techniques and modern junk.

Visitors to his "art space" (read: store), on Bangkok's rapidly gentrifying Silom Road, can find all manner of contemporary bric-a-brac — like stuffed toys, plastic bugs, crayons, dolls and Lego bricks — interwoven with Swarovski crystal, Venetian glass and semiprecious stones. Of the pieces on display, Manoonphol cites the I Can Fly necklace as his favorite: it features a stuffed caterpillar adorned with bejeweled wings and spiky vinyl beads of deep purple.

Don't feel like braving the traffic? Then Monoonphol might come to you, assuming you have sufficient cachet. He drops in on society ladies, and personally attended to Whitney Houston when she was in town, carting his collection around in the trunk of his BMW. If the buzz is anything to go by, he may soon be trading up to a cargo plane or two.