Roland Alzate and his winning piña and polyester hybrid creations (Photo by NOEL B. PABALATE)
MANILA, Philippines — The Fashion and Design Council of the Philippines (FDCP) recently culminated this year's Philippine Fashion Design Competition (PFDC) in a fashion show and award giving ceremony held at the PAGCOR Grand Theater in Parañaque City. The event celebrated up-and-coming fashion designers with a heart for social responsibility.
Designers Adante Leyesa and Roland Alzate are this year's grand winners for Accessories and Apparel, respectively.
Leyesa bested his contemporaries in the Accessories arena with an elaborate neckpiece, where tiny chain links are spruced up with wooden balls covered in piña fabric. There were also embellishments like small crystals and pearls. The oversized neckpiece, to maximize function, can further be divided into three necklaces: a choker, a fringed one and an avant-garde piece. Through his feat, Leyesa hopes to champion a “capability-
building” program to improve the operations of the Association of Disabled Persons in San Jose de Buenavista, Antique. According to Leyesa, he wants to provide livelihood to marginalized and disabled people in the organization by teaching them skills in making accessories. He also wants to help them by aiding them with their continuous production of piña fabric.
Baguio-based Alzate presented three ready-to-wear dresses in tropical colors for the Apparel category, using soft piña-poly (a hybrid of piña and polyester) fabric. He worked with a small community in Kalibo, Aklan, to produce piña-poly. It was a challenging task, as Alzate shares that it took almost two months before he and a local weaver were able to produce the right fabric combination. “There were times that I wanted to give up but the community is supportive of my endeavor. I learned through this competition that when you have a dream, you should go get it. You don’t give up along the way,” he says. By winning the competition, Alzate is enthusiastic about helping the said community through further production of piña-poly in a more affordable and mass-production-friendly manner.
Both the creations of Alzate and Leyesa will be mass-produced by Atelyer, a fashion house that, according to a press note, “aims to bring together the best Filipino fashion designers and Gawad Kalinga (GK) communities to produce world-class Philippine-made garments and accessories that will benefit the majority of the Filipino people.” It is located in GK Bulacan’s Center of Social Innovations.
Alzate and Leyesa both received P200, 000 as seed money, scholarship grants, among others.
Meanwhile, designers Marian Andrada and Mark Archibal Tamayo also got special citations. Andrada won the Smart Choice award for social impact while Tamayo won the Technomarine Excellence in Design award.
For this year's tilt, the FDCP believes that fashion is a good medium to promote sustainable livelihood in the Philippines, with the concept that locally sourced fabrics and materials have great potential for ready-to-wear clothing and to help communities as well. The FDCP trained 19 aspiring designers (10 for Apparel and nine for Accessories), selected from over 200 entries nationwide. Here, the trainees created accessories or garments out of 100 percent indigenous materials, in partnership with different local organizations and communities (such as fabric weavers) across the country.
The 19 finalists also underwent a four-day mentoring program at the School of Fashion and the Arts (SoFA) with Janelle de Leon Pimentel, together with FDCP members Gerry Katigbak, Jojie Lloren and Dong Omaga-Diaz. Basically, the latest edition of PFDC aimed to hone both the finalists’ artistic temperaments and business acumens.
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