SM to the World Makeover Challenge

The assignment seemed simple enough: Get a guy, take him to SM’s menswear department, and give him a makeover. For this project, I invited four artists from different international backgrounds to help me out:

Victor Magsaysay is a friend from New York from the ’90s. I was in Parsons, he was in FIT studying menswear design. I went home, he stayed behind and became part of the design collective called ORFI. He moved to Bangkok, then Paris, where he has been working as an artist for the past two-and-a-half years. He’s in town to "work on some photographs and pieces, (and) preparing for an installation in Berlin sometime this year about gender, people and identities, the subjects of which are from here and everywhere."

Ramona Boucher is a jewelry designer currently based in London. Her pieces, carried by Fred Segal in Los Angeles, have been bought by celebrities like Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Christina Aguilera, Brandy, Pink, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, and Mary Kate Olsen. She’s in town to visit family and to basically chill out.

Koro Fujiwara and Yodel Pe are from corogn.com, a design agency that started with web design and has expanded to interiors, graphics, and events. Koro hails from Osaka but has called the Philippines "home" for about eight years. He is married to a Filipina with whom he has two children.

Yodel is a graphic designer trained at London’s Camberwell College of Arts. She is also part of the events group 360 Degrees. To challenge them further, we decided to work on a theme called "SM to the World." I was assigned to pick a guy who’s not a professional model, and the stylists would have to make him look cool enough for the streets of Paris, London, Tokyo, New York, or Los Angeles, using SM clothes, shoes, and accessories. It would be something like The Amazing Race. Victor and Ramona would work as one team; Koro and Yodel, the other. Each team would have only two hours to go through the menswear department of SM Makati and come up with three cool outfits, the photos of which are seen in this spread.

The guy I chose was, surprisingly, named Jeremy Jordan. (Hold on, this is not the singer/actor Jeremy Jordan who co-starred with Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed, but a 17-year-old I had seen hanging around at Store For All Seasons and Freedom Bar.) He stood out for me because he has a style of his own.

Jeremy, a former student at Faith Academy, flies back to the US this month. I took most of the photos, all of which were taken inside the SM fitting room near Cashier 17.