Batch of 2012

MANILA, Philippines - We all have labels to contend with: The jock who wants to be in a musical. The wallflower who can turn heads at the prom. The artist who can skate like nobody’s business. Even the boy who wants to be a girl.

Everybody’s got something — a stereotype, a joke, a misconception — they want to prove wrong. A lot of these labels, of course, we first encountered in high school, where the social caste system is perhaps most glaring. The cool kids sit here, the burnouts sit there. It’s stupid. It’s silly. And the farther we’re removed from high school, more and more we realize how much those labels don’t matter, how people from different groups should be able to be friends, how one person should be able to be more than one kind of person. “It gets better,” goes the popular anti-bullying slogan and in this case, it really does. 

To end the year, we decided to do just that, present Manila as one big high school and divide the movers and shakers in the age group according to cliques. But as we realized while putting the shoot together, there are too many overlaps and too much cross-pollination. Post-high school, no one really cares where you sit anymore.

So on one fateful day in the Colegio San Agustin campus, we staged our own version of Breakfast Club (Breakfast Club that morphed into Lunch Club and then Merienda Club as the shoot wore on) and assembled some of the groups that made a splash in 2012. Included are some Young Star favorites, of course, people we first spotted before they went stratospheric and have been keeping tabs on since. If our March “Fresh Produce” feature on up-and-comers is the first day of school, consider this… graduation.

“Does that answer your question?” Sincerely yours, Mr. Vernon, Young Star’s Breakfast Club. Raymond Ang, Karen Bolilia, Toff De Venecia and Ralph Mendoza