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Lisbon Comes Alive

FOR its 99th birthday last year, the decrepit Fábrica Braço de Prata factory complex underwent the real estate equivalent of a Saul-to-Paul spiritual conversion.

A manufacturer of weapons during the dark years of dictatorship in Portugal, the long-disused facility was reborn as Lisbon’s most ambitious new cultural venue. Guns and grenades were replaced by concert rooms, exhibition spaces, a sprawling bookstore, a cinema, a restaurant and various bars.

When the metamorphosis was complete, only one potentially troubling question lingered: Would Lisbonfolk actually drag themselves to the city’s outskirts to visit an old industrial space with sinister associations and an unusually eclectic booking policy encompassing everything from electronic music to philosophical conferences to free-form jazz?

“It was a big risk,” said Michel de Roubaix, a resident artist who is the accordion-playing leader of a postmodern cabaret show at the center.

After all, this wasn’t a metropolis with a well-established avant-garde tradition like Paris or Berlin, but dowdy old Lisbon, a small Catholic city that is best known for inexpensive seafood meals, throwback cable cars and faded colonial architecture from Portugal’s long-vanished international empire.

But on a balmy night in March, the throngs filing into the complex made it clear that the city was more than ready for a bit of progressive bohemia in their remote corner of the Continent. Looking like the assembled listenership of some Portuguese version of National Public Radio, a buzzing crowd of tweedy academics, tattooed cool kids, bourgeois couples and bespectacled grad-student types fanned out to sample Fábrica Braço de Prata’s typically diverse offerings: a jazz combo, a reggae outfit, a Leonard Cohen documentary and a 1 a.m. after-party featuring D.J.’s and alternative bands.

“It’s creative in all areas — theater, art, music, dance,” Mr. de Roubaix said of the venue’s appeal, clearly pleased by its unexpected success. “There’s a fast turnover of events and shows that keeps the place very dynamic.”

The same could be said for 21st-century Lisbon.

Fábrica Braço de Prata’s transformation is emblematic of the city’s sudden cultural emergence. Like the factory, Portugal languished for much of the 20th century on Europe’s geographic and cultural margins. From the 1920s until the 1970s, a repressive dictatorship smothered the nation, sending the creative classes fleeing to London and Paris and severely stunting any potential arts scene. The economy also slumped. Once the center of a global trade empire, Portugal sunk into notoriety as Western Europe’s poorest nation.

As dust collected on Lisbon’s monuments — Roman theaters, Moorish edifices, Gothic churches, Baroque squares — the city became the Miss Havisham of Western Europe: a relic, forgotten and forlorn.

The last of the Western European capitals to experience a cultural bloom, Lisbon is avidly making up for lost time. All over the city, an upstart generation is laying waste to the sepia-toned stereotypes and gleefully constructing edgy and forward-looking ventures amid the time-worn monuments and quaint cobbled lanes.

“I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘Nothing happens in Lisbon. Why should we have to go abroad to see stuff happening and new stuff and to get inspired?’ “ said Nuno Pinho, 33, co-owner of a gallery called In-Cubo that opened last year. “Now there are so many things happening in Lisbon that you can’t get to everything — concerts, exhibitions.”

“It is not an old-fashioned city where the women still carry fish on their heads.”

A former antiques store, In-Cubo is devoted to graffiti and other contemporary urban art forms. Similar renovations are taking place throughout the neighborhood, Principe Real, where dilapidated buildings are filling with concept stores, galleries and boutiques. A short walk away, a formerly louche strip club called Cabaret Maxime has reopened as a much-ballyhooed new nightclub for the city’s most unusual and alternative bands and performance outfits. Throw in Lisbon’s new world-class art museum, the Berardo Collection Museum, and a nascent fashion scene, and you have Western Europe’s fastest-rising cultural center.

The future appears even brighter. Next year may see the much-awaited opening of MuDe, an eight-story museum of international fashion and design. Meanwhile, Norman Foster has been hired to construct a vast new development in Lisbon’s emerging design district, Santos , that will add even more cutting-edge shops and art spaces to the waterfront. The star architect Jean Nouvel, this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize, is also slated to add his postmodern stamp to the Lisbon cityscape. His Alcântara-Mar project, if realized, will contain four sleek buildings of restaurants, cafes, boutiques, gardens and apartments.

And as the city’s cool factor has surged, so has its international profile. MTV Europe held its music awards in Lisbon in 2005. Last year, the influential London-based World Travel and Tourism Council held its annual convention there. If anything, the global spotlight seems likely to get even more intense thanks to a bevy of high-profile international festivals that have started in recent years, including the biennial ExperimentaDesign (next up in 2009) and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (coming again in 2010).

On a balmy spring night, the gala 30th edition of Moda Lisboa, Lisbon’s twice-yearly fashion week, was in full swing. As a pulsating electronic-music beat filled the Estoril Casino ballroom, female models filed down a catwalk in futuristic black and gray garments suggesting haute-couture flight suits. Conceived by a young designer named Katty Xiomara, and known as “Metropolis,” the retro-futuristic collection owed a clear debt to Fritz Lang’s sci-fi film.

“In the beginning we didn’t have buyers, no fashion magazines, no journalists and only one modeling agency,” said Eduarda Abbondanza, the festival’s director, of the early editions of Moda Lisboa, in the 1990s. Next to her, Portuguese and Italian camera crews interviewed designers and local VIPs, many with champagne flutes and BlackBerrys in hand.

“Now we have fashion universities, and the world media is here,” she observed before shooting off a list of Portuguese designers now working senior positions in major international fashion houses: Balenciaga, Givenchy, Betsey Johnson.

For designers who have chosen to stay at home, the old lanes of the Bairro Alto and Chiado districts have become the choice spots for launching stores and showrooms.

By night, hipsters and young professionals fill the area’s myriad bars and D.J. lounges. By day, tranquillity resumes and savvy clotheshorses snap up locally made threads in boutiques like Ana Salazar and Alves/Gonçalves. Much of the best work imaginatively channels Portuguese history, geography or even literature into distinctive 21st-century garments.

“I’m from Madeira island, from the sun,” said Fátima Lopes, 43, the dark-eyed queen of Portuguese fashion, as she sat one afternoon in her eponymous Bairro Alto boutique. “I am used to wearing miniskirts and shorts. For me the body is nothing to hide.”

It’s hardly a surprising statement coming from a woman who in 2000 astonished Paris Fashion Week by mounting the runway in a self-designed bikini outfitted with about a million dollars’ worth of diamonds. (They were supplied by an Antwerp merchant.)

Similarly, a Latin warmth radiates throughout the angular, postmodern shop, whose bright orange and red walls hold all manner of colorful, finely cut and close-fitting clothing: slimly tailored gunmetal blue suits for men, long, low-cut red diva dresses for women. The Fátima Lopes woman, the designer said, “is strong and at the same time very feminine.”

As for fairy-tale waifs, coy Lolitas and escapees from the pages of “Wuthering Heights,” they flash their credit cards at Storytailors, certainly the most brilliantly strange new store to set up in Lisbon.

Opened in 2007 by the young design duo João Branco and Luis Sanchez, Storytailors isn’t so much a retail outlet as a cabinet of wonders where the ghosts of Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm haunt the racks. The 18th-century warehouse brims with hoopskirts, corsets and elaborate lace getups adorned with richly patterned fabrics and kaleidoscopic colors.