IN FILIPINO FASHION

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, AUGUST 17, 2007. STYLE WEEKEND IS PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY AS A SPECIAL MAGAZINE INSERT IN THE MANILA BULLETIN)

I heard some good news from Lancôme chief makeup artist and proprietor of the recently launched House of Laurel Makeup Studio Gela Laurel. A bride-to-be traveling all the way from Singapore booked her for trial. The Singaporean had apparently been told that when in search of a good dress, whether for bridal or other reasons, it was best to look in the direction of Filipino designers, “the best in the region.” And since she had agreed to come to Manila to look for a designer, she might as well check out the city’s makeup artists who “are just as creative.”

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit —Aristotle

Like all other things of our own, Philippine fashion design has been through the wringer in the critical eye of the Filipino. I guess it is in our nature, having had too many foreign influences, to look for excellence elsewhere, which is why we make a big deal of those who, like Josie Natori or Monique Lhuillier, make it in other places, often at the expense of their equally exceptional comrades who stick it out here, despite the pull of the bigger world out there. No offense to Josie or Monique, especially to Josie who has never given up on the local market, although I would assume it is only a drop in her New York bucket.
In recent years, a whole new batch of new designers have emerged and more than a handful of them has become so popular that their names now roll off the popular tongue quite as smoothly and as readily as Inno Sotto’s or Auggie Cordero’s or even Joe Salazar’s. In our press room, for instance, our directory of fashion designers has enough entries to fill up the Yellow Pages. What’s more, should we need to travel to places like Cebu for a shoot, there’s no need to worry about overweight charges as there’s no more need to fly in a whole atelier of clothes from Manila. An NDD call to Cebu’s growing A-list of designers like Cary Santiago or Philip Rodriguez prior to the shoot is all it takes.
The fashion industry is growing. It’s a problem for some, especially for the purists who believe that like fame and fortune the very idea of being a designer has become so accessible it has lost some of its “high life” nuances. That may be true in this age of reality TV, where all it takes to make your dream come true is Pinoy Big Brother, but the more, the merrier, if only because I still believe that sooner or later the mediocre (or the undecided) will fall by the wayside and excellence will prevail. In the meantime, we are happy we have a growing number of choices in matters of dress. As always, we have the choice to let mediocrity die a natural death, unless we are willing to embrace it and make it the norm.
With all the clothes on our shoot racks still eliciting oohs and ahhs, if not in terms of execution, at least in terms of promise, I am confident that, in general, the Filipino people have yet to mistake mediocrity for excellence. If this appears to happen, maybe we are just giving our fellows a chance.
And maybe to be given a chance is all we need. After all, the Philippines has been in existence only since 1521, as per the world records. France, on the other hand, has had at least since 843 BC, through the Verdun Treaty, to master civilization, as we define it now.

A
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