CEBU, Philippines - The humidity has risen along with the hemlines. While many designers seem to be running into difficulty over how to approach women’s wear this summer, dividing their collections schizophrenically between sober-sided sellers and artistic gestures of the sort they hope magazine editors will put on their pages, Marichu Tan, obviously a woman, has no such conflicts. She doesn’t have to cast about for a “realistic” attitude because that, and never made-for-editorial fireworks, is what her business is based on.
Marichu Tan, an authority in the arena of style, said it is best to respond to the times with a relaxed elegance that many women will identify with. It boils down to simple suggestions: an easy-fitting dress in a kaleidoscope of colors that would turn any pessimist 180 degrees. Her recent show opened and closed with masked models in rose colored glasses (an item that might turn out to be the sartorial symbol of this recession’s sudden shift in aesthetics), but the strange color combinations in between threw off any feeling of dullness. She took the shades of Gauguin—camel, canary yellow, ochre, sunset orange, and saffron—and deployed these in a way that gave life to pieces that might have seemed tacky in other hands.
All that was subtly reinforced by the long, street-like runway with a skyline backdrop, at the ballroom of Shangri-la Edsa Plaza, which gave an impression of a legion of city women pressing on with their lives, come what may. Just to welcome fun in the sun.
Bravissimo!