A DAY IN THE SUN

(From "A Weekend Note," the editor's letter in Style Weekend, a weekend special every Friday in Manila Bulletin, 23 November 2007)

In fashion speak, resort is a long-selling season, the pieces of which sell around the end of the year, but people wear them, as Calvin Klein has observed, until the summer of next. Cotton, of course, has its day in the sun in this hot, hot season, but only where the winter chill is sending people to the sunny parts of the world, such as the Caribbean and the tropics.

BLURB
What, besides khakis, is worth buying to take away? —Issac Mizrahi

Here in our all-year-round resort community of 7,100 ++ islands in the sun, the swimwear stores, along with the Boracay-bound flights and resort hotels like Whitehouse or Pearl of the Pacific or, especially, Chalet Y, are packed! Woe to those who did not think of booking their vacation back in July if they were hoping to end the year with a splash. From the third week of December to the first few days of January, Boracay morphs into Manila, albeit with white, sandy shores and alluring sun-sea-and-sky. Practically everyone is there, from your nosy neighbor to your fussy client, and the only way to hide if you’re tired of screaming “Hello! How are you?” along the length of the four-kilometer beach or while relishing your lycheetini at Hey Jude is to crawl under the sheets at your beachfront resort suite. Make sure you hang the “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door, if you do not wish to get up every now and then to let in a sunshiny hotel attendant bearing a bottle of Grey Goose or two from a friend next door.

Here in Manila, the cold months from December to February provide a rare opportunity to layer clothes: jackets over vests over shirts, with maybe a woolen muffler around the neck just for effect. Lately, with fashion gaining an upper hand in popular consciousness, Manila is more open to “eccentricities” and elaborate projections in style. To a growing number of Manileños, fashion, after all, has become its own excuse and, with your head up, you can wear a tank top over a voluminous tulle skirt, whether or not it is as passé as pre-movie comeback Carrie Bradshaw, at an end-of-the-year party aboard M/S Vianelle, whose cruise parties are legendary in Boracay, especially during the New Year countdown! Besides, if you do wish to show off your Hermés scarf-turned-head wrap in the middle of the beach, you can always say your SPF70 sunscreen is not just enough to protect your from UVA and UVB in this age of climate change.

In Manila, the New Year’s Eve destination, I believe, is going to be Embassy, especially now that it has expanded into the next-door building formerly occupied by the MTV office. I heard over the grapevine that the superclub, which opened its new side last Friday, is refurbishing the old one, so that pretty soon there are going to be two Embassies, one heavy on hip-hop and the other heavy on lounge music. An underground bridge will connect the two, so you can go from hyper to chill anytime you wish, unless two factions emerge out of this demarcation line, whose two sides have every potential to be determined by age or clothes or character or depth of pockets or sophistication of alcohol preference.

In places like the Hamptons, resort season is all about casual chic, but in Manila where resort season can last 365 days, depending on whether or not you can afford the hotel bill or, better yet, if you can afford at least a bahay kubo-on-stilts on the bank of the Mactan Channel, the season is best spent on your boot-clad toes hopping from one party to the other.

Defying the season’s forecast, whether for resort or for the holidays, black is, of course, the staple and how nice, indeed, to sit around lounge chairs sipping sweet white and nibbling on risotto balls while watching all the ladies air kiss one another in a million shades of black-is-beautiful, crinkled as crepe, taut as taffeta, shiny as silk, lively as jersey, and charming as cotton toile.

A
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