The Filipino is not a single silhouette. We are made of many tongues, many kitchens, many ways of tying a knot or cutting a sleeve. Our identity is not linear, but layered—sometimes argued over. We keep building even when the ground keeps shifting, even when rain falls hard enough to bruise. And still, somehow, the sun finds its way through the sky. That is what makes it powerful. “Who is the Filipino?” Rajo Laurel asks, beginning the thesis of his upcoming presentation in Bangkok this January.
RELATED: Why Heated Rivalry Feels Safer to Women (and How It Gave Them a Different Fantasy)
When Regions Refuse to Stand Alone
This event is a celebration of Philippine heritage through a 30-piece couture collection. LAHI unfolds as a visual journey through identity, history, community, and geography—finding harmony among these narratives without flattening their differences. But it’s the Filipino craft—made by many hands, shaped by many regions, burdened by many truths—that deserves to stand in the world.
For the designer, fashion has always been a way to understand people. This time, it became a way to confront what is hardest to face.
“Oftentimes,” he says, “when you’re trying to capture a sense of identity through the language that I know best, which is fashion. I find difficult to capture the emotion of pain and suffering.” He is blunt about what shadows this collection: “a lot of evil, graft and corruption and turmoil.” He doesn’t soften the words nor does he dress them up. “I don’t want to sugarcoat it. You will be able to experience this pain through some of the pieces in the collection.”
Couture is often accused of fantasy. LAHI refuses the fantasy that forgets reality. Some pieces will carry darkness as memory, as proof that beauty, when honest, can also ache.
Made in Company
Laurel formed his collection like a gathering, with mixture over neatness. Rather than treating regions as fixed references, he uses them as a shared language across the collection.
In “Mestiza”, the palma and camisa/blusa are reshaped through jusi from Iloilo, raw silk, and abaca from Abra, then sharpened by Cholo Ayuyao’s silk blooms from Pampanga. In “Datu”, T’boli heritage moves through paper silk and the malong, then shifts again with a tampipi from Benguet and beadwork from Dumaguete, turning distance into design. In “Paradiso”, Palawan appears through pearls, but only after passing through capiz from Bacolod and finishing in raffia. Across LAHI, regions are braided.
“I didn’t want it to be just regional,” he explains. “I wanted it really be a mix of the different beautiful things that I picked up along the way.”
That choice mirrors how Filipinos actually live. We are rarely just one thing. We are cousins of many places, inheritances of many migrations. We are already a collage before anyone tries to define us.
Many Hands, One Table
At the heart of LAHI is bayanihan. Laurel worked with Arnel Papa, Celestina Maristela Ocampo, Cholo Ayuyao, Monchét Diokno Olives, and Maxine Santos Tuaño, shaping looks from head to toe. He gives them room to answer him back.
He explains collaboration the way Filipinos explain food. “It’s almost like when you serve a dish, let’s say you serve adobo… Some people might put eggs. Some people might put coconut milk. Some people might put chili.” The dish is still adobo. But it becomes many adobos.
That is what happened with LAHI. Laurel offered the base. His collaborators altered the seasoning. “After putting that, you taste it, and something exciting happens.”
A Country In Conversation
Working this way taught Laurel something unsettling and exhilarating at once: he does not know enough.
“What has Lahi taught me?” he asks himself. “It taught me how there’s so much more. There’s so much more I need to learn about my culture, about my country, about my people.”
He speaks with wonder about younger creatives who take familiar culture and speak it in new grammar. “This particular generation… is inspired in using so much of our known culture and transforming it into their own languages.”
So, he watches. He listens. He resists the urge to dominate the room. “I just like to sit back and see what actually happens,” he admits. What he sees, with genuine curiosity, is expansion. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”
When LAHI walks in Bangkok, it does not arrive alone. It carries farmers, weavers, embroiderers, metal workers, bead makers, pattern cutters, dreamers who never see their names in headlines but whose hands decide whether beauty exists at all.
It also carries grief. Anger. Disappointment in leaders who chose greed over care. Laurel lets those feelings breathe inside couture because pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
And still, the Filipino keeps building.
We are a people who can hold sorrow in one hand and hope in the other without dropping either. We complain. We laugh. We sing at wakes. We cook when money is tight. We make dresses when politics is ugly. We send our work into the world not because it is easy, but because it must be done.
The Filipino, after all, has always been bigger than the whole sky. There may be plenty of rain. But we have never waited for perfect weather to begin.
Photographed by ALEXIS DAVE CO
