By Aubreylaine M. Salazar
Photos by Jar Concengco
Perhaps it is fate’s design that people end up with certain careers. To get to where he is now, Michael Leyva probably has the most unlikely story among his contemporaries.
With clients like Kris Aquino, Anne Curtis and Charo Santos Concio, the young designer has grown from strength to strength in recent years. But it wasn’t always like this.
How did Michael begin as a designer? Who inspired him to take up the profession? What keeps him going in the face of stiff competition and huge expectations? Here are five things you should know about him:
- Michael never planned to pursue fashion design. In fact, he was setting himself up for a career as a flight attendant. The six-foot tall Michael, now 28, even graduated from the University of Santo Tomas with a Tourism degree.
- That was until Michael lost his Kuya Brian Leyva. Thanks to his unmatched work ethic and edgy designs, Brian was already making waves as a designer when Michael was still in school. But he was robbed early of his dreams and his life after Brian was mugged and shot in the head by several cellphone thieves.
- At the time, Brian had three pending projects, and they had to be finished. Michael, despite his grief and with almost no knowledge about fashion, took it upon himself to finish the job. Michael then joined the airline industry as a flight attendant. But he was unhappy.
- Michael quit being an attendant and found himself convincing a woman to get him as her designer. He was at a lost as to how to start and finish the client’s dress, but Brian saved the day for him by appearing to Michael in one of his dreams. In that dream, he finished the dress for Michael. That was when he knew that his Maalaala-Mo-Kaya-worthy story would pave the way for him to become a full-pledged designer.
- Inspired by Brian, “his guardian angel, the wind beneath his wings that propels him to soar higher, unparalleled heights,” Michael later took up fashion courses under veteran designer Jojie Lloren and certain fashion schools in London. Despite making it big, Michael, to this day, never forgets to thank Brian, his mentor, protector and hero.
(This blog post was culled from an article on Michael Leyva by Alex Y. Vergara titled Fate’s Design, which appeared on the April-May 2018 issue of PeopleAsia.)
