Crazy Cupcake Fairy

Photos of the cupcake-inspired dress I made for my Pattern III class a few terms ago. I did this photoshoot for my portfolio. You can look at my new online portfolio here. I always update it with the better things I’ve done related to fashion.

My model is my sister and two of our dogs Natassja and Santi! I was going for a fun, nostalgic, childhood dream-like mood with a bit of noir twist. Whatever that is! haha but these are the photos that came out of all the nonsense. I basically told my sister to go nuts around the house. Some of the photos we had to do while mom wasn’t watching *cough, when she was climbing tables and chairs, cough*

cupcake fairy meets garden fairy

wanna see a cupcake do a cartwheel?

cupcake + water don’t really mix.. maybe a strawberry shake instead.

climbing not just walls

Santi licks the cupcake fairy

Chinese New Year Fashion Show

at the Heritage hotel as part of their Chinese New Year celebration. Some students and teachers from school were asked to design and sew modern Chinese inspired outfits for a fashion show during the event. We only had one week to make the clothes. Our models were the hotel’s sales/marketing representatives. The real bodies (as opposed to the standard model sizes) were a good challenge for us. My garment originally was supposed to be peach with charcoal trims but peach was hard to find apparently and so I was given old rose and silver satin. I got inspiration from an ancient Chinese dress called shenyi, more specifically the quju form of it. It was worn by women and I tried to do a more modern version, incorporating other typical Chinese clothing elements like frogging (those lovely swirly buttons) etc.

Photos from the show: (you may hover over photos to see the captions or adjust slide speed)

Un Nuit Au Maroc

Thursday last week, Amanda Agnes and Sari Lazaro organized a fashion show for their production class. It was one night of fashion in Morocco. Designer students from our school, LaSalle College International, showed their stuff: Athena Tandoc, Finela Gregorio, Engie Garcia, Marge Regala, Kristine Bautista, Miki Hahn, Sari Lazaro and me. It was a great show, thanks to Amanda and Sari.

The location nearly ruined everything but it still was a great show, thanks to Amanda and Sari, everyone who helped and the designers. The place, and I mention this only once, was Warehouse 135. It was such a bad experience I shall never come back there again of my own accord, but the YoU Magazine launch this Saturday (in which I will be showing some punk rock clothes) will be held there so that will be the last time. First, they had to be told to turn the a/c on while we were setting everything up. And there was no help or any kind of assistance from them at all. When we arrived there late afternoon, the place, looking all dilapidated under the unforgiving lights was dirty, with cigarettes butts everywhere, probably from whatever went on the night before. The toilet had a lot of cockroaches. The backstage was upstairs and I was always scared to leave our things without someone we know because this dodgy crook-like man was always hovering nearby. He won’t even fetch water for my friend who needed to take some medicine. And while the models were undressing, the crook-guy and another goon were stealing looks! Athena had to tell him to give us a bit of privacy and he took one step back. We had to compensate and hide from them when they should be helping make things better. While the show is on-going, I was watching from the balcony backstage, waiting for my turn, and one guy came up to me and had the gall to tell me to tell everyone else to not nudge the stupid tables because the club’s power breaker thingy whatever will explode. What?! That totally doesn’t make sense. And it isn’t even my problem if they have some hacked-up electrical wiring that could cause major accidents with a single nudge of a table. It’s their problem and they either fix it or someone ought to investigate that. They were really gross and rude and unprofessional. I don’t know where the people who work there come from or how they were trained (if there was any training at all) but since they represent that “club,” everything about it was revealed to me in very poor, but clear light.

So next time you think about going there, don’t be fooled by the sparkling lights that hide all the ugly reality and stay near the exits because someone just might nudge a table and cause an explosion: you are in a warehouse that declares the fact in cheap tarp in front and that’s all it really is.

Thanks to:
stylebible.ph
Flip TV
Konrad Ong
LCI photography students
everyone who made it a nice event.

Tie-Dye at PTRI

A couple weeks ago, we used the lab facilities at the Philippine Textile Institute for a hands on trial at dyeing fabrics using natural dyes. We used the natural dyes extracted from the barks of mahogany trees and achuete (what is achuete in English?) pellets. Natural dyes require mordants which help the dye to bond with the fabric for a good colour even through washings and exposures to light.

Fabrics must cotton and always be washed before dyeing to remove any present traces of finishing treatments it may have. Then tie it in places using polyester yarns or plastic ropes. Rubber bands might melt and cotton yarns might let the dye seep through.

Now on to the mordanting. Weighed the amount of mordant needed according to the weight of fabric being dyed. We used copper sulfate. This is the tied fabric boiling in the solution.

Mahogany bark.

Achuete pellets.

Boiling in dye.

one of Sonja’s

Fabric Fashion Show @ Embassy Fly

We had a show about two weeks ago. Myself, and my friends Kristine, Karl and Charmagne with the theme Emotionally Hardcore in Saving Mother Earth. We thank(?) Sir Lev for coming up with that idea. It is Emo + Eco/Global Warming fashion in one, essentially. Both inspired by some lesson topics we had discussed in class. Why emo and global warming? Emo because it is a fashion phenomenon that’s spreading so much it cannot be ignored. Since the emo culture is honestly quite a selfish way of life, it’d be interesting to relate being emo for a completely selfless reason: saving the earth. And global warming for the simple fact that it affects everyone, whether you choose to notice it or not. How we relate the two different inspirations together was up to us.

My collection is all about penguins with an emo twist. One of the effects of global warming is the melting of polar ice caps, home of the penguins. So they are affected first and worst. In the popular series Heroes’ world, it’s ‘Save the cheerleader, Save the world’ but in reality, it’s ‘Save the penguins, Save the world’.

That’s the idea. And ideas are always easier on paper. Haha..

A lot of the cautionary lessons I was told before were affirmed and there were a lot of new lessons learned. A fashion designers’ world isn’t as glamorous as it seems. It really isn’t. It involves a lot of work, you can’t do everything on your own and since it involves a lot of people, you run into characters ranging from midly annoying to frighteningly offending. It’s easy to overlook many of the little details involved along the way. And it really does pay to be nice. Nice, not gullible.

Needless to say, the whole thing was an experience that was totally different from anything I’ve ever known. The preparation was neverending, the wait was nerve racking and the actual show was intense but over in an eye blink. It was all both very real and surreal. And I’d be so lucky to keep doing this as long as I can.

More photos in a coming post. Backstage photos in my Multiply.

Special thanks to:
Imagine
Manila Bulletin
Manual
Inquirer.net
Fudge
Gadgets
Mtv
Fashion TV
Sugar Sugar
stylebible.ph

And thanks Sir Lev. =)