FILIPINOS are among the most fashionably dressed in Asia, whether you include or exclude those crazy rich Asians (who are mostly Chinese anyway, and they live in Singapore, if Kevin Kwan is to be believed).
A long time ago, as I recall the memory of the one and only Ernest Santiago, women of the streets – not necessarily hookers – provided inspiration with their mix-and-no-match of colors and patterns, but oh how he smacked his lips at the ladies’ ingenuity, be they fishwives, vendors, palengkera, plain pedestrians, jeepney passengers. Pockets in their aprons, pockets hidden in their underwear, pockets cut into their skirts or dusters (daster? I’m not sure of the spelling, but every woman my age knows how comfortable they are as house clothes). These fashion-unselfconscious women wore their skirts like a sarong or malong. Pants or skirts, their garments were styled loose and airy, nothing to constrict their bodies, everything to do with identifying their status as working women without an office. They disdained zippers, which inspired Ernest to make clothes that had no buttons, no zippers, only bows and straps.
Several of those dresses are still in my closet; any day I can wear any of them without squirming when I face the mirror. They’re timeless, designed to be worn forever to last, a long way from today’s so-called disposable fashion. What’s with disposable fashion? Well, they’re creating an environmental problem. Nothing like the emperor’s new clothes, only that they’re outrightly, frankly disposable. Which means, colors fade after a few washes, loose threads appear very soon, fabrics are usually synthetic and cheaper, to the point that the wearer doesn’t mind throwing out the goods after a short spell or two.
Tons of donated garments are piling up so fast around the world that Third World nations suspect they’ve become a dumping ground of the conspicuous-consumption set. If the fashionable ones can’t stop buying, they should stop donating – are you sure that poor people envy you for your fashion sense? Fact is, burning clothes by the ton is not only costly, it pollutes the environment.
Brigitte Bardot’s cry in the last century was to stop killing animals for their fur. Today’s plea should be to stop fashion as a disposable commodity, or go naked.
