Grief has a strange relationship with time. A person can be gone for years and still feel near; a memory from childhood can return with startling clarity; a new life can begin just as another comes to an end. Those contradictions became the starting point for RJ Santos’ The Waiting Room, Randolf’s latest collection at MNL Fashion Week 2026, where an ending and a beginning occupy the same space.
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The Story Behind RJ Santos’ Collection
The premise is deeply personal: designer RJ Santos lost his grandfather four days before the birth of his niece. One life was leaving as another was beginning, an emotional coincidence that made the distance between goodbye and hello feel very small. Santos imagined a room somewhere beyond the boundaries of life and death, where the two could meet, and where the dogs his family had loved and lost could be there, too.
There is almost childlike reverie about the collection’s optimism: the belief that if a place cannot exist in reality, maybe clothing can build it. Memory becomes its own architecture, with flowers, photographs, drawings, familiar phrases, and fragments of people preserved in fabric.
How Floral Motifs Tell the Collection’s Story
Its personal origins are immediately apparent, but it is the collection’s ambitious ambiguity that makes it affecting. Flowers become especially poignant. Santos looked through his own camera roll for images of blooms and remembered the occasions attached to them—birthdays, farewells, celebrations, declarations of love. Those images become enlarged prints and appliqués across the collection, where a flower can signify a beginning and an ending without choosing between them.
A sheer dress is covered with circular floral frames, each bordered by soft ruffles as if tiny photographs have been pinned onto a translucent family album. Some hold flowers; others reveal images beneath the fabric. A pale blue shift dress carries cut-out forms that resemble flames or petals, while another look is almost entirely submerged beneath layers of three-dimensional white flowers. On a denim jacket, embroidered birds appear to take flight from a blue panel framed by curved strips of fabric. The motifs feel collected, as though someone had opened a drawer of keepsakes and decided there was no reason to put anything back.
Randolf’s irreverence is particularly useful here. The collection’s proportions are generous and its surfaces busy, yet the looks remain connected. There is tenderness in these gestures, but also a wink. Grief does not have to dress itself in black.
Santos lets patterns, textures, and visual signatures recur across the collection, giving the looks a familiarity that makes them feel as though they belong to the same remembered place.
Music References and Skin-Shedding Transformations in the Collection
Time has little regard for chronology. A single moment can pull the past into the present in seconds—which is perhaps why a Mariah Carey song can feel like an unexpected reunion.
One phrase recurs across the collection, too: “Always Be My Baby”. Taken from the singer’s song, the words become more than a pop reference when placed against the collection’s ideas of childhood, family, and the passage of time. It captures something essential about grief: people change roles, grow older, leave, arrive, and disappear, but affection has no corresponding timetable. It could simply be a personal favorite from another time, too—a detail whose meaning belongs to the designer himself.
The collection also carries the label’s interest in transformation through motifs inspired by skin shedding. A snake leaves its old skin behind, but the discarded layer is proof that the body was once there. It becomes an apt image for a collection in which letting go does not mean erasing.
Randolf takes circumstances that could easily have produced a collection about mourning and gives them another possibility. The clothes hold grief and affection in the same place, allowing loss to exist without making it the final word. There is no neat resolution because loss rarely offers one. What fashion can offer instead is form. Between goodbye and hello, RJ Santos finds that there was never an empty space at all. And there could be room for another meeting.
Photographed by KIERAN PUNAY of KLIQ, INC.
Frequently Asked Questions
RJ Santos lost his grandfather four days before the birth of his niece, an emotional coincidence that inspired him to imagine a room beyond life and death where the two moments, along with his family’s late dogs, could coexist.
Santos used images of flowers from his own camera roll, tied to memories of birthdays, farewells, and celebrations, turning them into enlarged prints and appliqués that represent both beginnings and endings without choosing between them.
The phrase, taken from Mariah Carey’s song, recurs throughout the collection, reflecting the idea that affection persists across time even as people change roles, grow older, or pass away.
The collection includes motifs inspired by snakes shedding their skin, symbolizing that a discarded layer is proof something was once present, reflecting the collection’s theme that letting go doesn’t mean erasing what came before.
RJ Santos’s “The Waiting Room” was presented as Randolf’s latest collection at MNL Fashion Week 2026, photographed by Kieran Punay of KLIQ, Inc.
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