Sporting architecture: The Adidas Building.

One upon a time, a shirt was a shirt. Then along came the clever marketing boys who convinced everyone from LA to Lagos to Luang Prabang that if you wanted to stand out from the crowd you had to buy a shirt with an ad for the manufacturer splashed across the front of it. For this privilege you were happy to pay a premium of a couple of hundred percent.

These days, the only way to get a shirt without advertising is to go to a tailor. We’re all used to it now. We’re all trained to want to show everyone else that we know what quality is – and that we can afford it.

So it’s a bit of a relief that Phuket now has Premium Outlet, which opened on April 11 on the east side of the bypass road, about 800m from the Koh Kaew traffic lights.

Premium Outlet is a village of pleasing quasi-European architecture with two parallel streets about 400m long, connected by cross-streets. Every shop carries a brand name. There is, of course, a passel of famous brands: Nike and arch-rivals Adidas, Hush Puppy, Guy Laroche, Pierre Cardin and Van Heusen, along with Levi’s and Lee shoulder-to-shoulder, and a large Warner Bros emporium at one end.

There are also lots of brands the Observer has never heard of  (but then the Observer admits to being no expert): French Kitty (shouldn’t that be “Allo Kitty”?), XL for Men, Rampage (ooh), Axara (which sounds like a property development, but isn’t), Xoxo (how do you pronounce that? Soxo? Ksokso? Shosho?), L. Secret (the name written in large, decidedly unsecret letters), and a brand whose name cannot be replicated here because it contains a letter that does not exist in any known alphabet. Our guess is it’s known as “Exact”, but please don’t quote us.

Even Daffy Duck is offering 70% off

We didn’t see Ralph Lauren or his Polo shirts, but not to fear. Instead we have Gallop of California, Beverly Hills Polo Club, and Santa Barbara Polo and Racquets Club. Plainly, the idea of people playing croquet from the backs of horses is a powerful one in marketing terms.

Nor did we see Valentino, though there is a Valentine shop. There’s also Warehouse, which looks nothing like a warehouse, but is very pretty nonetheless.

There’s Sports Stadium at the other end from Warner Bros, a huge place where you can get all that good stuff that makes you play sports so much better, and next door there’s a golf shop selling gear by Callaway, Titleist and Tailormade. Swinging.

And then there’s Character World. “Yes, I’d like a rather dry, witty character, and I’ll take a cheerful, naive character for rainy days. Could you gift-wrap them, please?” We jest. It’s a toy shop.

The toilets are smart and clean, there’s a food hall in a crimson building shaped a bit like one of those Mexican churches in a spaghetti western, and there’s a coffee shop that may or may not be called Box Office (no sign outside).

The really good news is that just about everyone is offering huge discounts – up to 70%. Off what? you may ask. Off the full price, of course. But is the price high or low? That depends. We saw a pair of flip-flops for B250. A bit steep when you can buy a pair in Lotus for B20. But then, of course, they did have an essential brand – we forget which one – stamped on them.

And we did see some nice croquet-on-horseback shirts for B450, which seemed reasonable.

Premium Outlet’s best marketing ploy is that it can get uncomfortably sticky schlepping along the hot and humid streets of the village. The only way to get out of the heat is to get into the air-conditioned shops.

So don’t delay. Get down there today. Just do it.

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