The Adora designer who caught Suzy Menkes’ eye

Remember the name Adante, because he’s sure to become the next big thing in accessories.

In the Philippines we have loads of talented accessory designers, sure, but how many of them have impressed legendary fashion journalist Suzy Menkes, or been featured on the Vogue Italia website?

Fairy-tale beginnings

I meet Adante Leyesa at Adora, where he started selling his wares only a week ago, and he shows me the necklaces that have garnered him so much international attention.

“Last February I was among six Filipino designers at the International Fashion Showcase in London,” he relates. “Suzy Menkes stopped at my booth, scrutinized everything, then said, ‘Great! Wonderful! Do you have a card?’”

Adante had no idea who this woman was until they shook hands and a wave of flashbulbs popped. After a week, Vogue Italia presented the 50 best pieces they’d handpicked from a thousand on the website, and two necklaces from Adante’s Sebastian series were chosen, accompanied by a photo of him meeting Menkes.

That led to an offer from luxury British department store Harvey Nichols, inviting Adante to present his collection to them next year.

Adora-tion

It was Adora owner Marilou Pineda who had the fashion prescience to realize that Adante and Adora would make the perfect match.

“My daughter-in-law Marivic told me that I had to see his collection because it was so beautiful and the quality superb, and that Eman would surely find him fit for Adora,” Pineda says. “This was at Manila FAME two years ago.”

When she finally saw his pieces, she was immediately smitten: “How my heart throbbed when I saw his collection!”

Adante, who hails from Lipa, Batangas, is an accountant by profession and came to the design game late, five years ago when he was 30. He remembers it well because it was right after typhoon Ondoy in 2009, which ravaged his home so he was forced to sell his first designs at a bazaar.

“That was the time of bib necklaces, and I introduced neckpieces using metals, chains, and mixed it with semiprecious stones,” he recalls. “At the time it was new.”

His jewelry attracted instant notice. A day after the bazaar, he was invited to shoot with stylists and photographers, and his work started appearing in newspapers and magazines. 

He started entering design competitions, and won the Fashion Design Council of the Philippines’ “Weaving the Future” in 2011.

A new direction by Josie Natori

Through CITEM and Manila Wear, Josie Natori mentored Adante for three years. While CITEM trained the budding designer in exporting and branding, Natori gave him a completely new design direction altogether.

“At that time, I was more into neckpieces,” Adante says, “but Ms. Natori pushed me to go for bags. I listened to her, worked on product development, sourced materials, and from my very first tampipi clutch bag, I’m now on my eighth series of 1920s fringed and tasseled bags.”

In 2013 he won a scholarship to Sheffield Hallam University as a special awardee in the British Fashion Council’s “Look of Style” competition, and Pineda provided him with an airline ticket so he could take the short course in accessory design at Sheffield in the UK.

“My mother (Rustan’s founder Glecy Tantoco), used to do this for talented artists, and the opportunity was there,” Pineda says. “I believe in his unusual talent!”

She facilitated his entry into Adora after Sheffield, and the Adante Collection now occupies a special place in the department store’s bag section on the third floor of Greenbelt 5.

Gatsby and the 1920s

His 12-piece collection blows me away, in particular his Sebastian neckpieces from which religious symbols like crosses and angel wings dangle. A jeweled charm that I think looks like a censer was in fact inspired by the Virgin Mary’s crown, and he draws my attention to the fact that the bauble is crafted from safety pins!

“It’s one of my techniques,” he notes. “I keep revolutionizing the use of traditional materials like safety pins and bamboo.”

He uses tampipi, or woven bamboo strips, as the base of his bags, but don’t expect the usual native-looking baskets and cases. His evening bags and clutches trail fringe and feathers, and are encrusted with crystals in designs so ornate they go beyond baroque to rococo.

I’m not a maximalist at heart, but, like everyone else before me, I instantly fall in love with Adante’s work. His level of attention to detail is exquisite (it takes two weeks to make one bag; three to five days to produce a neckpiece), world-class, and most importantly, original — on par with the most exclusive haute couture brands.

“For Adora I designed these Gatsby-inspired pieces,” he says. “The theme is ’20s but overall the design concept is called the Cathedral Collection, inspired by the basilica churches that fell in November last year after the earthquake in Bohol and Cebu.”

The stained-glass windows of San Sebastian Cathedral in Lipa, Batangas, inspired his Sebastian series: “The basilica is very memorable to me because my mom used to send me there every birthday since I was seven years old,” he says. “We live on a mountain, so every birthday it was something special to have to go down to the church.”

Even better, those who craft Adante’s pieces benefit whenever you buy an accessory, as his production processes are livelihood-based. He sources his tampipi from the Ifugaos in the Cordilleras, the bags’ suede lining (actually pigskin) is from a tannery in Bulacan, and everything is hand-stitched by his kababayans back home.

“I’m closely working with young mothers and out-of-school youths back in Batangas, and mentoring a GKonomics community in Taguig,” he says. “I’m very happy because I design based on the concept of social responsibility, so society can enjoy these luxurious products made by marginalized communities.”

Admittedly a “frustrated painter,” he’s grateful to Adora for giving him the perfect venue to express himself. “Sir Eman Pineda is very professional and Ms. Marilou Pineda, she’s my fairy godmother,” he says. “She’s very stylish also and the fact that she’s loving my pieces is validation that I’m on the right track.”

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The Adante Collection is available only at Adora, on the second and third floors of Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Makati, tel. 217-4029 or 0917-557-7405.

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Follow me on Facebook (Therese Jamora-Garceau), Twitter @tjgarceau and Instagram @tj108_drummergirl. Photos by THERESE JAMORA-GARCEAU