Runway rundown

There is always the hope, every Philippine Fashion Week, that something great will jump out and make the trek to the Rockwell Tent worth it. As Preview’s Pauline Suaco-Juan said while waiting for one of the shows to start, "I watch all the shows because I always find a gem waiting to be discovered."

Most cases, you have to dig through lots of dirt before you get to the good stuff.

With five designers debuting collections, it took a while before we got to the nice stuff.

Alex Pigao opened with an ethnic tunic, a decent enough effort considering his past exploits with "experimental fashion." An example: from a group show a while ago, he sent out a gaudy dress with ribbons trailing from the bodice — each ribbon tipped with a little fish figurine. Not a dress one could easily forget.

For his current collection, Pigao focused on a red palette juxtaposed with earthy beiges. A textured minidress, embellished with red oblong pieces, seemed normal enough. And then the show veered into bad ’80s territory: ill-fitting jumpers, short pantsuits, asymmetrical skirts and halter tops with strange fringed hems.

Aside from any visible signs of coherence, the clothes suffered from a lack of polish. Hems were unfinished — as though the edges were cut minutes before the models made their walk down the ramp — and several ensembles looked like they were the result of cheap draping tricks learned from the window display of Castle. If this seems too mean, let this serve as a warning to designers who choose to finalize a collection way past the deadline. The devil, as every fashion follower knows, is in the details.

Keepin’ It Cazh

Jun Escario and OJ Hofer teamed up to create glamorous sportswear in bold primary hues like bright yellow and vivid cobalt. The duo stuck with a simple silhouette — the tank dress — and embellished it with a bubble hem, rope detail along the neckline, and mirrored cutouts. It’s emblematic of the whole casual sportswear movement to paint the knee-length frocks in blue and yellow — which could explain why so many of the dresses felt familiar. It would’ve been more interesting to see these dresses in a less obvious color palette. But that’s a minor flaw, as I’m sure their clientele will grab the wearable pieces from the racks as soon as they’ve made their bow on the catwalk.

Eveningwear consisted of a gold-spangled dress with three-quarter sleeves and some monochromatic outfits in black and white.

Menswear, meanwhile, took a definite turn to the ’80s with ensembles that looked lifted out of some Japanese movie circa The Karate Kid as someone next to me put it. Some young dandified suits in skinny silhouettes were passable and will find a market with the party circuit, but the more zen pieces looked straight out of a David Hasselhoff video.

Running With Tracksuits

Regine Dulay took up the same sporty cause with casual thigh-skimming numbers in a neutral palette.

Save for some unfortunate ruching on the inseam of some cropped trousers — which gave the impression of a wedgie — there were some promising looks. The dresses with cutouts in the back weren’t one of them.

Perhaps the pitfall of a 30-piece solo collection, particularly for youngsters like Dulay, is a tendency to digress into redundancy. Instead of steering a collection into a forward direction, bringing in variation and broadening a theme (or refining a concept), it’s easier to riff on the same idea over and over again. Except that tends to bog down a show and make the audience antsy for something new — all in the span of 15 minutes or less.

The trick is to change it up. In Dulay’s case, the sporty tank dresses morphed into minimal minidresses in a gray wool-cotton blend with a draped neckline and a lilac blouse with cap sleeves and mini tulip skirt.

Smocking pants had a lot of promise, as did his plum trapeze dress, while a funnel-neck suit spoke of restraint.

The Classic

Ronaldo Arnaldo never fails to please. For two years running, he’s come up with wearable collections that make sense in a local setting. This time around, he’s broadened his range to include sexy LBDs and loads of sophisticated eveningwear. Aside from silk shifts in jewel tones set against taupe, there were cute shift dresses that tipped its hat to the mod trend. Cuter still were the pockets placed near hips, which made the otherwise staid dresses younger and more laid-back.

In between tweedy dresses and one Muglier-esque power bitch suit that seemed out of place, the rest of the pieces felt like a confident step in the right direction.

For evening, there were elegant columns of silk in empire cuts, Grecian one-shouldered dresses and a greatest hits collection of sleeveless floor-skimming gowns that will definitely get some red carpet traction during the holiday season.

Arnaldo’s seasoned touches are everywhere in this collection — from the clean finishings, the effortless fall of draped silk, and the figure-flattering cuts on parade. The man has finally come into his own.

But perhaps the most standout talent of all was the long-limbed figure traipsing down the runway like a pro. Supermodel runner-up and Calcarries’ model Charo Ronquillo, who’s already scored numerous editorials for the likes of Teen Vogue, Spanish Vogue and Marie Claire US, was working the ramp like a pro. Goes to show that Pinoys can go far. Now if only some of the designers could play catch up and follow suit.

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