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.
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.
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.
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.