Style-wise, the relationship between Taipei and Shanghai is best described by the locals I speak to as friendly rivalry. Frankly, the very fact that Taipei is a contender says a great deal about its emergence since Shanghai has a century of cosmopolitan decadence under its belt. Also, Taipei is comparatively tiny – at 2.6 million people, it’s less than a fifth the population of the Chinese cosmopolis.

The Ximending district of Taipei is where wild fashion experimentation gets truly out of control; this neighbourhood competes with Tokyo’s Harajuku as an epicentre of outrageous style. We emerge from the subway into a giant plaza flanked with giant electronic billboards dwarfing intense kids with cellphones. I immediately bump into a posse of peculiar-looking youth: The girls wear demented schoolgirl outfits; the boys wear baggy hip hop gear. East meets West but barely says hello. The rules here, apparently, are no rules at all: Kids vie with each other for the distinction of being the least conventional poseur on the block. I pity those poor professional cool hunters, probing all this teenage weirdness and trying to transform it into something mainstream.

As we enter the back alleys of Ximending, the energy intensifies like a bottleneck. Wackily dressed kids hang out in a pink building filled entirely with photo booths. Jovi and clare and I squeeze into a booth, immortalize ourselves and decorate the photos with ridiculous hearts and bubbles. It’s a kitsch phenomenon from Tokyo, one of many outlandish Japanese trends the younger generation of Taiwanese love. Also hugely popular are Japanese (the styles, not the stylists) hair salons offering ragged bangs, pigtails and ponytails and colours found nowhere in nature.

The tangle of back alleys is filled with tiny stores offering the cheap bits and pieces – colourful tops, peculiar dresses, odd shoes – that inventive adolescents can combine to reinvent themselves as rare, exotic creatures. Jovi, in her limited English, explains that she is occasionally paid by these kids to outfit them for cosplay, a Japanese ritual (“costume” plus “play”) in which fans dress like their favourite manga and anime characters. I am tempted to have her inflict a complete makeover on me for a souvenir of my trip to Taiwan, but I suspect I don’t have whatever it takes, psychologically, to wear this stuff in public, let alone be photographed.

The Taipei style is open to more diverse influences than just those of Shanghai and Japan. One night, we visit a new Ministry of Sound disco, an offshoot of the London original. Another night, we dine in a manner both calm and cool at the Bed – owned by two famous local actors – which offers designer Vietnamese cuisine and designer tobacco (cappuccino-flavour, anyone?) to be smoked in large hookahs. I shop at a foreign store that features heavy clothes from an exotic country halfway around the world. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it – Roots?)

All this is not to say that the style of Taipei’s chic denizens is derivative of other cultures. They’re simply cosmopolitan, in the truest sense of the word. They are citizens of the world. They take dashes of whatever they like from other inventive cities on the planet and shake it all together to create their own brand of chilled, candy-coloured fusion. [ ]

Where to stay – Where to eat – What to do?

ADD YOUR COMMENTS > letters@enroutemag.net