Summer HUGS in Wintertime

cary santiago, merce brenner, emanuel hamoy, & jun escario

Last winter, a friend took a two-week break from his 5^th Avenue work at Blanc de Chine, New York. Escaping the freezing cold of the Big Apple, Emmanuel Hamoy warmed his tropical days in the company of friends and family in the Philippines.

if i

…were to name the three most stylish women today they would have to be Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Carine Roitfeld, and Zoe Kravitz

…

The Subanen Princess

During my visit to Zamboanga Sibugay for the holidays last year, I sought out indigenous fabrics for a possible garment presentation/auction in an art gallery abroad. In my earliest collections, I incorporated fabrics such as the T’nalak from Davao and Langdap from Marawi into garments of clean, linear silhouettes. 


These fabrics were readily available through sources provided by my aunt Henrietta Ele who is the founding director of Darangan Dance Troop of The Mindanao State University. Her company globe-trotted for fashion presentations with Ben Farrales in the 80’s and today, she owns an extensive collection of indigenous fabrics from the South. She showed me this collection a couple of years ago and it sparked off an idea.