What a privilege it is to be alive and experience the gift of change. We love personal growth and fresh beginnings that open us to new possibilities! The hard part, of course, is that we have to leave a comfortable version of our lives behind to venture into the unknown. Worse, it’s inevitable. Eventually, everything and everyone must go somewhere else.
Likewise, Renée de Guzman, Bryan Peralta, and Edwin Ao aren’t staying in the same place. Their collections for Day 1 of BENCH Fashion Week Holiday 2026 are wildly different in execution, with each designer facing forward or backward as their clothes reveal more about where they’re going.
R.STUDIOS
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There’s a younger soul hidden inside R.STUDIOS’ Paloma. During a trip to Spain, Renée de Guzman encountered Pablo Picasso’s 1957 Pigeon series and was struck by how youthful the paintings looked for an artist so established. He knew the irony himself: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
De Guzman finds her own way back there, too, and the pigeons follow her home. This time, they belong to Paloma, where her early instincts get another turn. The designer keeps the silhouettes relatively relaxed through softly structured separates, while the birds appear more literally in the accessories.
Bryan Peralta
Bryan Peralta goes to space! Figuratively speaking. His The Golden Record lineup draws from the 1977 NASA Voyager probes and the golden discs containing records of Earth for extraterrestrial life to discover. It’s a charming reference for his ready-to-wear debut. The first outing is, essentially, a sartorial interstellar time capsule. How fun is that?
The bizarre anatomy and vivid coloring of nudibranchs (better known as sea slugs) give him plenty to play with as a hedonistic ’70s lens pushes his tailoring toward looser proportions.
Edwin Ao
Edwin Ao, meanwhile, lets the sun have a go at his clothes. Solar printing is central to Chlorophyll Hexagons: The Body in Impermanence, where sunlight and chlorophyll leave their own traces on the textile. It’s an apt technique for someone thinking about the body as fluid, since Ao is interested in how memory and experience alter us while we’re busy living through them.
He follows that thought into forms that are fragmented and put back together differently. There’s no anxiety over returning them to what they were before. Ao would prefer to see where the process takes them.
The most exciting part of Day 1 of BENCH Fashion Week Holiday 2026 is knowing that none of this needs to represent a final destination for Renée de Guzman, Bryan Peralta, or Edwin Ao. Fashion affords them that freedom every season. Life takes longer, yes, but the principle still holds: we’re unfinished ourselves, and that’s a good thing.
Photographed by KIERAN PUNAY of KLIQ, INC.
