Wearing them on the job will be the new normal until an effective vaccine against COVID-19 is discovered. The country’s flag carrier has resorted to such preventive measures for the safety of its employees and passengers.
By ALEX Y. VERGARA
Fashion designer Edwin Tan barely had two days to make personal protective equipment (PPE) suits for flight attendants of Philippine Airlines (PAL). Channeling certain life lessons he learned from his late business partner as well as his background in Medicine, he was able to produce the rather unusual requirements that passed PAL’s stringent standards on time.
On April 11, he received an urgent call from PAL officials who were frantically sourcing for PPEs to be worn on a couple of sweeper flights commissioned separately by the Canadian and Australian governments to repatriate some of their citizens left behind in the country soon after regular flights dried up sometime last month in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine.
“We showed them the prototype the next day, April 12. As soon as they approved it, my team and I worked overnight. By April 13, we oversaw the delivery to PAL of 100 sets of PPE, which were the first batch of their order,” Edwin shares over email.
He can’t even tell exactly how many people worked with him to fulfill the rush job, as they were also busy simultaneously making PPE suits for various hospitals. He estimates that around 30 people, including himself, were responsible for ramping up production to meet the flag carrier’s urgent needs.
When asked if wearing PPE is now standard operating procedure for PAL’s flight attendants, Edwin says: “Wearing them will be the new normal until an effective vaccine (against COVID-19) is made available to the public. By doing so, PAL is taking preventive measures for the safety of its employees as well as its passengers.”
The veteran designer had several things going for him that most likely made PAL turn to him on the 11th hour. For one, the designer is a graduate of both Medical Technology and Medicine. He was, however, unable to take the board exams for both disciplines because by the time he graduated, the couture and uniform business he and the late Pepsi Herrera, also a fashion designer, opened had started to take off. Edwin had to choose. Medicine’s loss became fashion design’s gain.
“Being a graduate of both Medical Technology and Medicine gave me background knowledge on the do’s and don’t’s with regards to infectious diseases. Knowing the basics helped me understand how to tweak the standard PPE,” he explains.
He and Pepsi were managing partners of a company that to this day still carries their names. While they catered to individual clients for made-to-measure orders, they worked together as creative partners for their uniform label dubbed as “The Sartorial Duo.”
With Edwin now as the company’s sole creative director, the management function has been taken over by his nephew JM Vargas.
And because of Pepsi, who, for a time, worked as a flight attendant for PAL while also designing and running the business with Edwin, the latter has been able to develop plenty of friends at PAL through the years.
“When my friends at PAL approached me, they told me they were frustrated because the PPEs the airline’s cabin crew wore were a mishmash of what they could get in the market,” Edwin relates. “Their main requirement is for me to produce a standard PPE for 100 people.”
And Edwin did: an all-white PPE livened up by the Philippine flag’s three other colors—red, blue and yellow—in the form of diagonal accents on the right shoulder. Edwin also followed the general guidelines for PPE by using a non-porous, non-absorbent material.
At the same time, he drew inspiration and practical ideas from Pepsi, who, thanks to his 14-year career with PAL, knew a thing or two about how uniforms should move and function. He had to quit the airline for good to focus on their thriving business.
“I still recall several things he underscored based on his experience and what he learned while wearing the PAL uniform. Mobility and comfort should be the foundation, he stressed to me again and again, of a good, well-made uniform. So this time around, when PAL approached me to do their PPEs, these were some of the factors I really took to heart,” says Edwin.
As a seasoned uniform designer, Edwin also factored in such considerations as wear and tear. Unlike those used in hospitals, the PPEs for PAL’s cabin crew are meant to be washed and disinfected for future uses.
“To be more cost-effective in the long run, I made sure of using a sturdier material with a much better ‘fall’ on the wearer compared with standard PPEs used in hospitals. Apart from durability, I also really paid attention on fit and proportions,” he shares, in obvious reference to its wearers’ need to look sharp while representing both PAL and the country.
The order was so rush that Edwin doesn’t even have photos of himself with the first batch of flight attendants wearing his creations. What the public has seen in most publicity shots are actually some of the airline’s flight attendants wearing prototypes of the designer’s PPEs—uniforms they would wear for some time to come as part of the new normal.
