If a needle and thread are a designer’s first friends, Lilah Roché is well-acquainted with hers.
The scene: she’s backstage at MNL Fashion Week 2026, making final adjustments to the women already dressed in her designs. A stitch is added exactly where it’s needed, followed by another check of the fit. A staff member tells her it’s time to bring her models out to be photographed, but Roché persists. She doesn’t stop until every garment sits right on every body type.
It’s a tenderness toward women that’s easy to appreciate. Roché could’ve called it a day several stitches ago, yet close enough clearly isn’t good enough. For all the talk in fashion about representation and body inclusivity, Roché understands a basic courtesy that can still get lost in the process: the clothes should fit and look good on the woman—not the other way around.
Sampaguita Queenpin Puts Lilah Roché’s Feminine Point of View Into Practice
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As it turns out, she extends the same approach to femme fatales. Sampaguita Queenpin takes the Philippine action films Roché grew up watching with her parents and pulls a gender switch on one of Manila’s most notorious gangsters: Asiong Salonga. Immortalized several times in Filipino cinema, Salonga gets a new life in Roché’s hands as a woman who begins selling sampaguitas outside the church and eventually runs the whole operation herself.
Putting her in charge also gives Lilah Roché an opening to address who gets to command the clothes themselves. “Women are boxed as eye candies or a person who can just slap pieces of fabrics together, but women can be engineers and directors of clothes too,” she says. According to her, tailoring remains a male-dominated field, and she wants more women to claim the technical side of fashion for themselves. Her own fixation goes right down to the seams: “Look inside my clothes and see my passion just from there.”
Photographed by KIERAN PUNAY of KLIQ, INC.
