Melissa Dizon: Aloft in thine Eairthly flight

It was stylist Michael Salientes who first introduced us to Melissa Dizon, the creative force behind Eairth — considered to be one of the more cohesive RTW lines based in Manila.

I was like a child in awe the first time I visited her studio, going through pieces from her collection suspended from S-hooks. From thereon, whenever I have friends from abroad wanting a taste of Filipino fashion, I direct them towards Melissa Dizon’s showroom located at 101 Bormaheco Condominium, Metropolitan Avenue corner Zapote Street, Makati.

2009 promises to be a year of growth for Eairth.

Melissa is in her fifth month of pregnancy (her second — she has a grown-up son named Lucien) and soon after giving birth she will start preparing for her wedding, which she envisions to be “simple, kitschy and not so high maintenance.”

For this special event, she plans to design her own T-shirt wedding dress. She recently launched her website (www.eairth.ph) designed by siblings Melissa and Joey la O’.

An online store is also in the works to accommodate customers from here and abroad. Melissa believes e-commerce “is a smart way to reach out to people throughout the world because it’s really difficult to set up a freestanding store. We get so many requests from overseas, we figured having an online store is the best way. It’s easy, quick, low finance, and low maintenance.”

Having received numerous e-mails and cards of appreciation, Melissa plans to include a forum in her site where people can post their insights.

For fall 2009, the designer invokes flight, with many pieces referencing wings. The collection showcases Melissa’s design evolution by unlearning the fundamentals of fashion such as side seams, armholes and necklines.

“I’m so bored making the usual pattern. So I just draped the stuff. Most of the pieces are draped softly or cocoon-like,” she explains.

The decision was made unconsciously, with the shape and form coming into their own.

“I started with a basic tee, which is sort of the shape or beginnings of a cocoon and it became a real cocoon with a double layered T-shirt. Then it became this Manobo bird T-shirt that has wings on the back.”

Aside from her customized cotton jerseys, fabrics include indigenous materials like tinalak, abaca, and hand-woven abel handcrafted by Ilocos weavers. For the knitted pieces, she uses fine and heavy gauges of boiled wool.

A special feature of the collection is a new organic color called Blue Bird, which is a soft cobalt blue. Here in the Philippines, the color indigo is produced in the provinces of Abra and Aklan. Unlike the Japanese kind, which is normally used in blue jeans, the local indigo bears a cooler, grayer shade. To achieve a very rich color, pieces from the collection were dyed in an indigo bath eight times.

Among the must-have pieces are: the Bontoc Paraglider (bomber jacket with a giant alien-like hood), Yakan funnel dress (double-layered piece lined with two different weights of jerseys), the Maranao halter (open back scoop floor-length dress), the Maranao flight dress (with attached scarf on the back), Tiboli cardi (boiled wool sweater with long sleeves hanging down to one’s knees) and Melissa’s favorite, the Manobo Bird (a T-shirt dress with wing details on the back).

Eairth continues to enjoy a growing list of international stockists. The collection will be available at Tauk in New York, Harvey Nichols in Hong Kong, and soon in Tokyo. She is currently working out European distributorship for London, Paris, and Berlin.

Melissa is also happy to announce her next project.

Her son, Lucien Marc, a Fine Arts student from Cooper Union, will collaborate with her for the next collection, hoping to attract more male customers. She points out that her son rarely wears her designs and likes only three basic pieces: the Yakan polo shirt, Kalinga chino pants and Maranao slim pants.

In order for him to wear Eairth all the time, she assigned him to design all the men’s pieces for spring 2010.