Model-entrepreneur Bay Doucet tells us of her many loves in Kuala Lumpur.
One of Bay Doucet’s earliest memories was going to Bestari in Sri Hartamas for breakfast every Saturday morning with her mother, sipping on Milo. They must have been quite the memorable duo to the mamak staff—a Chinese lady with full white, pixie cut hair alongside her lanky, curly-haired, Caucasian-looking daughter. “We would always sit at the same table and they’d already know my mom’s order of teh tarik and my Milo ais,” she reminisced.
The Hartamas born and bred had seen the neighbourhood grow from a quiet, green suburb into the expat hotspot that it is today. “Growing up in Hartamas was really nice. It was so green, everywhere was just forest. We didn’t even have Hartamas Shopping Centre yet, I think, and this was definitely pre-Publika,” the 27-year-old model-entrepreneur mused. Having lived in Kuala Lumpur all her life, Doucet described having different relationships with the city in the varying stages of her life. She’s gone from seeing it through a privileged lens to having her eyes opened to its raw underbelly—yet she never strayed from her love of the city.
As we sat outside a cafe on a cloudy afternoon, glass of iced matcha latte sweating on the table, we chatted about all aspects of love in her life: this city, relationships, fashion, and doing better for the world. This is the Bay Doucet known to her loved ones, the version the world doesn’t know of yet.
A Love Letter…to KL
As a child, Doucet’s life revolved around routines. Grocery shopping with her mother would be at TMC Bangsar and the wet market. If they weren’t having breakfast at Bestari on a Saturday morning, they would be at Coffee Bean in Bangsar Shopping Centre. “I used to get sticks of honey from Coffee Bean at fifty cents,” she remembered. Then, it was guitar classes at the guitar store in Desa Sri Hartamas, and the print shop where she and her mother would frequent just to print school supplies. Everything in her life was a five- to ten-minute journey away, and the people in the neighbourhood also got to see Doucet grow up. “That’s an experience you don’t expect to still get in the city—although Hartamas is a suburb—but it’s still nice,” she said. This was her first relationship with Kuala Lumpur: young, bright-eyed, protected by her mother, and moving around a little bubble in this city called home.
Then, she moved to Melbourne for university. “I was there for four years and never stopped being homesick,” she laughed. She missed her entire support system back home, and she missed how large KL felt. “Melbourne is so small in comparison. KL is sprawling—every part of it can feel so different that you can never really truly know it. I never found my footing in Melbourne, which is why I came back immediately after graduation!”
Her time in Melbourne was also when KL was at its peak with the creative movement—REXKL had just opened its doors to the public while pop-ups and flea markets started becoming popular on the weekends. “Every time I came back to KL for my semester break, I would try to intern or get a part-time job—I’ve worked at Snackfood and Zhongshan Building,” she said. She also applied to intern with local interior designer Adrien Kent, who now owns Studio Kanta. These became her entry points into the creative industry, solidifying her stance to return to the city.
“I felt like KL was growing and changing, and I wanted to be part of that rather than being just another member of the ecosystem in Melbourne, which felt developed enough already,” she elucidated. “Coming home meant that I could be part of this growing movement rather than jumping onto what was already established.” And here it was, a different relationship stage with KL: ambitious, idealistic, and brimming with possibilities.
“The older I get and am exposed to different sides of things, I see the city differently. I think watching Abang Adik made me see KL differently as well. That side of KL shown in the movie is not something I grew up experiencing because I’m privileged enough to live such a lucky life,” she said.
“I see the good and the bad, but being a creative helps. It’s so often the creative things that make an otherwise gritty city look and feel special; they are the ones that go in and make something ugly beautiful again. Take REXKL for example—a twice-burnt down old cinema, now a space that holds so many creative businesses, events, and pop-ups. It just takes somebody coming in with a vision and doing something with that,” she concluded.
A Love Letter…to Love
On the topic of Doucet’s love life, things have been very, very exciting. She recently got married to actor Sean Lee, and the pair broke the internet when they hard launched their relationship at their wedding dinner. But we asked her to take it back to the beginning—how did the two meet? “Through YouTube, actually,” she laughed. Not quite a dating site, she explained that they got to know of each other’s existence back when the YouTube community in Malaysia was fairly small. She was 14 years old then, and was posting videos of herself singing and playing the guitar. Lee had also just started posting acting skits for himself and subscribed to her account.
“We didn’t interact, and years passed. When I signed up for Instagram in college, he also started following me. Later on, we began chatting more frequently through Instagram,” she said. This friendship continued until she moved to Melbourne, where they finally met for the first time when he traveled to visit his friends. “We decided to meet up in Melbourne, and things continued on after that,” she smiled.
Keeping the relationship lowkey for eight years is an impressive feat, considering how both of them are in the public eye. The decision to do so was very important to Doucet, as she did not want to be under public scrutiny all the time—Lee’s acting career had only just taken off. “I was glad that we kept things lowkey on the internet, because it gave me room to develop my own style and career direction, rather than being part of a couple,” she added.
Offline, Doucet remarked that things don’t feel too different post-wedding, since they had been together for such a long time. Despite having completely different personalities—Doucet enjoys being a wallflower and Lee can basically find out any stranger’s life story in five minutes—she says that they view relationships the same way: “It’s less about what we feel on a day-to-day basis and more about the commitment we make to each other.” It’s how they survived long distance in the first few years—the conscious decision to make it work.
Her husband, however, is not the only big love of her life. Her mother is, too.
As an only child to a single parent, Doucet is extremely close to her mother. Getting married and moving out meant that there was a constant tug-of-war within her on wanting to grow as a person and feeling guilty about “leaving” her mother. Tears were shed, she assured me, and she still grapples with finding a balance between going home to have dinner and seeing her mother as often as possible. “But it’s very hard,” she admitted. “Not a lot of people talk about [this aspect]. Most of my friends are blessed to have siblings and parents who are still together, but it’s just been me and my mom for so many years. It’s hard for her to let go of me, but it’s also hard for me to let go of her. It’s something you know has to happen at some point…like ripping off a bandaid.”
“My mother also fears for me. When she’s not here, she worries about who I have left in my life. I don’t have siblings, so there won’t be any other person who will go through life with me. So I suppose part of me wanting to get married a little earlier than others was because I also wanted to expand the circle of who my family was.”
A Love Letter…to Fashion
“I got into fashion by accident,” Doucet confessed. Something most models can probably relate to. When she was interning with Adrien Kent, he recommended her to his friends, who were looking for a model for their first bridal campaign. “I had zero knowledge about being a model, but I was young and thought why not? It was wild; they picked me up at 10 at night to check into an Airbnb in Putrajaya, and we woke up at five in the morning to start on hair and makeup. The entire shoot took 13 to 14 hours! Looking back, it was such a funny and great experience—everybody starts somewhere,” she reminisced. This was the shoot that started her modelling career, she believed. “That semester break when I was interning with Adrien, I did eight shoots. One thing would lead to another, and I guess because the industry is so small, people were always looking for a fresh face to shoot.”
Doucet never took the modelling path well travelled, though. She didn’t sign with an agency, preferring to manage herself. While it helped with her choosing the type of work that aligned with her style, it also meant that she sometimes had to turn down lucrative opportunities. In the beginning, it seemed easy to want to say yes to everything, but Doucet also felt that if she did say yes to everything, she would become just like everybody else. It was a struggle she had to come to terms with: discovering her own goals and milestones for herself as a model and a content creator.
“I am quite passionate about sustainability, and unfortunately as a model and content creator, I can’t always have full control over the brands that I work with. I’ve now gotten to a point where I would say yes to one PR gift a month. Obviously, that means I don’t have as many clients as I once did, but I couldn’t take being wasteful—it wasn’t who I wanted to be at my core. I know it’s just a job, so I have this messy relationship with the whole idea…which is why I’ve always wanted to start my own brand,” she said.
And so, Looop was birthed alongside her two other partners, Emma Khoo and Adani Bakhtiar. Formerly colleagues at Riuh, the trio knew that they worked well together and had a good synergy of different skills. A circular platform for clothes where people could consign their preloved everyday clothes for others to shop, Looop, to Doucet, “made it easier for me to sleep at night.”
Those who have been following Doucet for years on social media will probably have noticed that her style has also changed since opening Looop nearly three years ago. A combination of hiring younger girls on the team and styling their customers has pushed Doucet out of her comfort zone in terms of styling her own pieces. “Ultimately, it’s made me realise that trying on clothes is very important. I try not to buy clothes online because I think how clothes make you feel when you’re wearing them is very important. And that’s why at Looop we really believe in the in-store experience,” she stressed.
“I still grapple with a lot of guilt over my day job,” she said. “It’s a lot of mixed feelings—I love this job, its creativity, and how it lets me express myself, but having Looop means I have something that feels me and is true to me.”
Photography: Chuan Looi
Creative Direction: Ian Loh
Styling: Sarah Chong
Hair: Zac Lee
Makeup: Crystal Fong (Plika Makeup)
Styling Assistants: Joseph Cheng, Alyssa Jasmine
Photography Assistants: Richy, Yew, Zi Xin
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