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This is an excerpt from the MEGA July 2025 Designer Profile
One of the joys of discovering a young designer as talented as André Plaus is we get to see his early beginnings. We get to witness him grow, make mistakes, learn, and aim for the stars with all the audacity of the young; early works that more than hint of his potential, already standing out from the rest by its sheer promise.
What’s even better is that he is not aware of his own potential but is willing to believe in the people who tell him to follow where his talent leads, even before he knows it himself. That’s how he started on this path in the first place.
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“I’ve never desired to be a fashion designer. It was actually my parents,” he shares, placing the responsibility of his current life trajectory squarely on their shoulders. Though he liked making his own clothes, and making other craft projects, he never considered pursuing fashion. In fact, he was planning on taking up psychology in college, but his parents asked him if that was truly what he wanted. Why not go to fashion school instead?
Yes, even Plaus recognizes that his parents’ wholehearted support for the arts over sciences was unusual. But even then, he still had reservations. “I didn’t even know how to draw!” he protested. But his parents assured him that this is something that he’d learn along the way in fashion school, and insisted that he pursue it and don’t worry about anything else. “Fake-it-til-you-make-it-moment talaga!” he laughs.
ON THE JOB LEARNING
Once he got into fashion school, Plaus threw himself wholeheartedly into the work, learning, exploring, and taking his time to find his design ideology. “It took time for me to find my design ideology that is concrete. “One thing’s for sure is, gusto ko talagang pa-hirapan sarili ko [I like giving myself a hard time]. I started with recycled everything—recycled denim, patch- work, quilting… even now, with knitting. I really value craftsmanship.”
“The Philippines is known for our weaves and one of my advocacies is that I want to send a message that the Philippines can also do other textiles such as knitting. I feel like our world, especially in fashion, everything is moving too fast,” he continues. “Machines can easily replace you. But what the machine cannot do is take away the craftsmanship of a real person. It’s funny that I’m saying this when I use a knitting machine…but it’s different. I promise!”
And it is different! His knitting machine is a vintage flatbed domestic manual knitting machine he found in a surplus store in Laguna via Facebook marketplace. He went to YouTube for video tutorials to learn how to use it and joined Facebook groups for troubleshooting as he worked on the machines. “And the one who answered my questions were grandmas from the US and other countries!”
And in the spirit of “Fake it until you make it!” Plaus learned how to use the machine while working on his collection for his thesis and Fever Dreams Inc., the collection that helped him find his design ideology, and introduced his talent to the world.
FEVER DREAMS INC.
“I’ve found my true aesthetic as a designer—the colors, and I base my designs from nostalgia, because I’m a nostalgic person,” Plaus says, and he brought this aesthetic to life in his Bench Design Awards entry he calls “Fever Dreams Inc.”
If black, beige, and whites are the colors of corporate wear on Earth, what would the office attire of a company based in a galaxy far far away look like? For Plaus’s alien company Fever Dreams Inc., the corporate uniform would be fun, colorful, and quirky, with out-of-this-world silhouettes in knitted material that moves—and seemingly has a life of its own. In this collection, Plaus lets his love for the retrofuturism of the 80s and 90s cartoon and television shows come to fore, with silhouettes harking back to the 1960s to 70s hippie fashion.
This collection made it to the finals of Bench Fashion Awards. It’s another one of those crossroads in Plaus’s life where people who believe in him intervened to point him to a path he should take. As he tells it, he was in the middle of working on his thesis so he had no interest in joining the competition, but his teachers practically forced him to. “As in, they were really insisting, even up to five days before the submission!” he shares. “Good thing, by that time, I was done with my paper. So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll join.” He laughs. “I feel that it’s a divine intervention, because illustration is my weakness, but I was able to come up with eight designs in three days.”
Read and see more of André Plaus’s Fever Dreams Inc. in MEGA July 2025 issue now available on Readly, Magzter, Press Reader and Zinio.
Photography by JERICK SANCHEZ. Fashion Direction ROKO ARCEO assisted by ERICA TEROL. Art Direction JONES PALTENG. Makeup XENG ZULUETA. Hair PAT TY CRISTOBAL. Photography Assistant KARL RIMANDO, BUDDY REYES, and DAVE ORPILLA. Producer THESSMAR LECTURA. Model HILDA of LUMINARY.
