Day One of the biannual fashion week’s latest edition featured three designers, including a young master technician who loves to shock and awe audiences with his out-of-the-box vision. This time though, afraid of appearing “faux and inauthentic,” he purposely reined himself in as he drew from the personal.
By Alex Y. Vergara
The three-day Bench Fashion Week (Spring/Summer) 2023 kicked off yesterday at the Bench Playground in BGC with three featured talents headlining Day One. One of them even drew inspirations from an unlikely source—the family’s neighborhood-based food business—to produce Filipiniana-inspired pieces like no other.
TRNZ and Big Boy Cheng for Human and Secret Fresh, respectively, tapped on their respective visions and fashion savvy to produce colorful but wearable ready-to-wear separates in the form of pants, shorts, skirts, tracksuits, shirts and printed tees.
On their own, the clothes produced by both brands can very well stand on their own. Thanks to the creative styling by Bench’s in-house team led by seasoned stylist Noel Manapat, the pieces got an added visual boost through layering, color blocking and unconventional ways of wearing certain key pieces.
As expected, however, the loudest applause was reserved for designer Jaggy Glarino, who did a fitting finale by paying homage to the lowly carinderia (neighborhood eatery), his family’s main source of livelihood back when they were living in General Santos City.
“I grew up there, but my parents are really Illongo,” Jaggy shares with PeopleAsia. “Restaurant is too posh a word to use to describe it. We owned and ran a carinderia and one of our specialties was La Paz Batchoy.”
His past, he continues, was something he didn’t hide or was ashamed of. But it was something he didn’t celebrate or publicly embrace either. Until yesterday. “And, it’s very elating,” Jaggy, a Bench Terno Con finalist in a previous edition, says.
Drawing inspiration from everyday objects like the kumot (blanket) and the lowly mantel (printed tablecloth made of plastic, which usually features either fruits or flowers), Jaggy collaborated with digital and sustainable garment designer Imprintela to produce printed silk and crepe fabrics featuring oversized fruits in three color combinations.
Jaggy then fashioned these fabrics into slip dresses, aprons and oversized suits. At one point near the end of his show, three models—one guy and two girls—their faces obscured by the tablecloth-covered tables resting on their heads paraded on the runway. Each table held what looked like a pile of neatly rolled fabric that matched the tablecloth.
Three counterpart male models in printed oversized suits that matched the tablecloths later assisted their colleagues in laying their respective tables on the runway. Before the audience could guess what was coming, the first batch of three models, including the guy, began slipping into Jaggy’s printed dresses. Yes, the matching pile of fabric on top of each table was actually a slip dress waiting to be worn!
“I think competing in Terno Con really changed me in a positive way,” says Jaggy. “It has made me appreciate Filipiniana and being Filipino more. During the pandemic, I was also able to pause and look back on my childhood. The results are now incorporated in this collection.”
Other references to the kitchen were gloves that doubled as potholders and utilitarian accessories like half-open nylon bags filled with vegetables.
“It’s a subtle way of honoring what my family did before, including my nanay (mother) and tatay (father) going to the market early in the morning,” he shares.
Apart from prints, Jaggy, the master showman who loves to play around with relatively new and avant-garde techniques, silhouettes and styling, also let lose mostly one-of pieces made of treated denim, native woven fabrics and salvaged articles of clothing fashioned from knitted crochet.
“As a whole, this collection is an attempt to produce pieces that are more wearable,” he explains. At the same time though, the collection’s couture appeal wasn’t totally lost. “Like our knitwear made of crochet. Some of them are one-of (one-of-a-kind) since we salvaged the crocheted material from the ukay-ukay (pre-loved clothes store) and re-crocheted them.”
But more than the techniques, which are challenging in and of themselves, the main obstacle Jaggy had to overcome was how to be true to himself when he chose to reveal an aspect of his past that was personal.
“I had to make sure that I’m portraying a story inspired by my childhood that didn’t come across as faux or inauthentic. Sometimes, when you get too technical or too focused with techniques and fabrication, you tend to loose the essence of what you originally set out to do,” Jaggy concludes.
Day Two of Bench Fashion Week (Spring/Summer) continues today at Bench Playground. Featured brands and talents are Bon Hansen, CHED Studio, Urban Revivo and Rhett Eala for Kashieca.
