THE GREEN VERNACULAR

I'M no eco-warrior. Nor do i profess to be some kind of eco-saint. Like almost everyone else, I’m prone to wasteful consumerism. Let's just say clothes, shoes, accessories, and random beautiful things make me weak in the knees. Styrofoam and plastic packaging? Yup. I'm not a fan but when it is truly unavoidable, I don’t go out of my way to avoid it. Leaving the lights and the computer on. Woops. Clearly, this is a less than impressive introduction to what I propose to be a research/project/journal on eco-conscious fashion in the Philippines. But this is how I choose to start this -- with the truth.
This year's Philippine Fashion Week was the great reveal for me. It was my first collection and I decided to take the autobiographical route as a means of introduction. Called Lost Continents, my collection was shaped by the themes of displacement and disjointedness, a nod to my life of itinerancy and constant relocation. Producing it literally took blood, sweat and tears. And at the end I had a very personal ten-piece collection that strode down the runway, basked in some glory, and then detoured into a corner of my room, to be stowed in storage. Along with piles of fabric that I fell in love with at one point and hated the next. Beside mountains of beads and buttons and trimmings that suffered the same cruel fate. Fashion is fleeting after all. How can it not be? A forward thinking industry, always steps ahead of the consumer, it thrives on updating itself season to season to cater to the modern consumer's whims and infinitely shorter attention spans. "One day you're in, the next day you're out," as Heidi Klum says. This is true not just for the designer's shelf life. It is the very essence of the fashion industry.
So this was the great reveal: I belong to an industry that creates the most beautiful things, some horrendous, quite forgettable things, and like many of today's industries, A LOT OF WASTE. I know this all too well. And that disillusions the hell out of me.
And makes me want to do something about it.

So this is my ode to the Philippine fashion industry and the environment. THE GREEN VERNACULAR. A research/journal on homegrown ethical, eco-conscious fashion and sustainable and organic textiles. And, alongside this, and inspired by the amazing Perfect T-Shirt Project, a personal project in which I hope to create a ten-piece collection that leaves a minimal carbon footprint on the environment.