The signs to design
Listening to Pazzy Navarro recount the “road she traversed” before she arrived at this juncture in her life where she makes a living off the apparel, shoes and bags designs she creates and sells online, it would seem destined that this is where she now finds herself. There were several career “side-streets” taken along the way; from a stint on the staff of the then Youngstar magazine, to being a makeup artist and being tapped by both Lancome and MAC to be their local chief makeup artist, and even working as a pre-school teacher. But if genes and family, one’s environment growing up, and having first worked as a fashion model, can play their part in making things seem hindsight-inevitable, then Pazzy Navarro online would seem to be “written in her stars.”
We laugh about her design philosophy, as on the evening we meet she’s fully garbed in black, and admits her own closet would be 90 percent black, with 10 percent white! She steers away from fashion colors and trends, isn’t floral or cute by any long stretch, and doesn’t do seasons. Rather, she produces new collections every two to three months, so her client base will always have something new to choose from. Feminine to the max, with a touch of homage to vintage, she’s essentially modern without being outrageous. She’s partial to form-fitting designs, and makes no bones of the fact that her clothes may not be for everyone. When it comes to shoes, she sticks to flats, because she’s after comfort first, and wants her customers to wax rhapsodic about how her shoewear are stylish, durable, and comfortable! She’s always after that timeless element in her designs, eschewing the merely faddish or trendy. And no, she isn’t local fashion’s Morticia Addams, designing exclusively in black. With a smile, she recounts how a best-seller in a recent collection was a slinky black top paired with a bright neon yellow skirt. Her splashes of color, when they appear, are often in the accent and the detail.
As a young girl, Pazzy was very aware of her grandmother having seamstresses on call for wardrobe requirements and adjustments in fact, some of them now form part of the workshop she maintains working on her designs. To this day, her abuela won’t face the world without her red nail polish and red Clinique lipstick, wearing a turban when descending from her bedroom to have breakfast. Being stylish, being conscious of always putting your best face on when leaving the house, paying attention to how one was dressed and looked, were all second nature to Pazzy. And so was being independent, having a head for business, and being practical. Pazzy remembers vividly how when she was a teenager, it wasn’t about being pretty or beautiful. For her parents and family, it was about how you were excelling in school, and what achievements of note were being accrued even at a tender age. With all that as background story, it isn’t surprising to discover that a course in design at Slim’s was all Pazzy needed to jumpstart her career as a fashion designer.
A single mother with two boys aged 11 and seven, Pazzy has no nanny to help her raise the boys. The online nature of her business is then a godsend, allowing her to be a hands-on parent, her work schedule and mobility revolving around her parental responsibilities. She jokes that her friends say she’s crazy for insisting on this set-up, but she avers that this is what she always wanted, for parenting to be this personal and intense. And because the children are boys, with less fuss having to be made over them as they grow older, she knows that when the younger one reaches 10, she’ll be devoting more time to the business - her craft and passion. But for now, she doesn’t want to compromise her parenting principles, and finds things are going fine. Me, I’m left wondering what her former pre-school students thought of their teacher, who would, day in and out, be totally dressed in black!
Puh-leez navidad: The low (and) down of why I love our Christmas season
A short list of why the Christmas season here in Manila is such a joyous time, and brings out the Scrooge in me!
At no other time of the year can I spend every morning counting, and carefully scrutinizing in detail, all the billboards that dot the urban landscape between my Makati residence and my ABS office in Quezon City. Who cares about meetings, appointments, and presentations when I can spend more than four hours a day in the air-conditioned comfort of my car, examining in detail, each and every billboard and banner that festoon our gridlocked EDSA! And if these parables of marketing and communication feel repetitive after a full week, there are steel planks and potholes that make EDSA so much more interesting than your average, well-paved American motorways and German autobahns. Daily, it’s an exciting game of reveal and display as these steel planks aren’t fixed, and they often move or shift. I read sometime in late November that the roadworks that mysteriously spawn and multiply annually in October were outlawed, and it’s so refreshing to discover that roadworks don’t know how to read! Even Darwin and theories on Natural Selection could take a lesson from these roadworks, and their evolved instinct for survival... and how they confound observers, by disappearing in January.
This is now my eighth month on Facebook yes, I am a late, and formerly reluctant, social networker. And the flurry of heightened activity come Christmas season only confirms what I feared were the pitfalls of having joined. It may operate as advertised in most parts of the world, a social networking device primarily for the young; but that doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to us Filipinos. In fact, as far as we’re concerned, I move that more than Face, we should refer to it as StomachBook. It seems that our major activity is to post photos of each and every meal we consume, whether in a restaurant or at home. Yup, that’s really interesting to me, knowing what’s in your stomach, what you’ve eaten and aren’t sharing, or what you’ve prepared at home and I’m not invited. I can aleady see the countless posts of Noche Buena that will inundate my homepage in the coming weeks. So if some geek out there knows how to program my FB page to automatically reject photos of food, real estate offerings and music videos from the ‘80s... Hark the Herald Angels Sing!
Yes, Christmas is just around the corner, and you can hum your favorite carol; me, I’ll just hum... bug! Ho Ho Ho!
