AN ORIGINAL SEEN: Yvonne Quisumbing

There are some things in fashion that are simply the best – the paragons of luxury and design, measurable by hours of craftsmanship, and made of the finest materials.

Then there are things that are unique, the only one of its kind in the world, precious things to be displayed in a museum, or auctioned off at Christie’s, re-sold eventually for an obscene amount of money.

But even rarer still are the things in fashion that are actually original – objects that stun, puzzle, provoke. The type that makes the onlooker mutter and stutter to herself, in a moment of confusion, "Oh … I don’t think … No … Uhm … I must say … I have never seen anything … quite like this before."

  Yes: original, seminal, inventive, something you’ve probably never seen before – such is the work of one Yvonne Quisumbing, 29-year old Filipino designer behind Umma Gumma Couture.

A blouse in Indian silk that looks as if it had been yanked, woven and pleated straight out of the cocoons in some tree in Bombay, then spangled with brain-teasing beadwork that does not look anything like a flower, a starlit sky, a rain shower, a waterfall, or any of those pretty patterns from Mother Nature that inspire the usual beadwork. Look closely and you see a lot of silver balls, some feathers, leather petals, a plastic blob; step back and, like a Monet of what is just really dabs and daubs, voila, you find a landscape that makes complete sense, a coherent composition that is, quite frankly, beautiful, and you’re in a daze.

Next thing you know, you’re shaking your head, and you’ve become your old, lucid, rational self, and you blurt out eagerly to the creator: "How the hell did you come up with this?"

Yvonne is quite a shy one, so she’ll smile and hesitate with her reply, but if you coax her properly the answer you’ll get is as unexpected as her work itself.

It was literature, she says, that inspired her, as she mentions the great 20th century writer Angela Carter. A short story entitled "The Bloody Chamber," a reworking of the scary fable of Bluebeard, where Yvonne chanced upon a poignant, eerie paragraph about how a virgin bride presaged her own gory future when her fiancé clasped a chain of blood-red rubies around her neck, yet proceeded to marry him anyway. The scene so affected Yvonne that she created her own choker, not of rubies, but of silk and feathers and silver and leather and plastic, which later evolved into a belt, a bag, transmogrified into a blouse, later matched with huge balloons of skirts. An entire collection was thus born.

Then you will hear the term "Art Brute"– outsider art, the product of art therapy conducted on mentally ill patients in long-term institutionalization, where day after day they labor over handicrafts that ease them from the isolating horrors of insanity. Over a prolonged period of time, it is said, the artworks produced from these exercises become so intricate, profound and moving, that they are nothing short of genius. They are original, containing their own perfect logic, fashioned from a mysterious part of the brain that others could only have nightmares from, and in their own mystifying and compassion-inducing way, are indubitably, art.

After art is brought up, a name sprouts: Gabby Barredo, the brilliant sculptor. He is Yvonne’s mentor (though she claims she has never told him so to his face), for his convolutions of steel and brass have changed her eye forever. A Barredo coffee table, for example, is so complicatedly molded and engineered that when you plug it into a socket it suddenly moves inexplicably like the mechanism of a clock, and becomes a conversation piece, a true coffee table, in the most sophisticated sense. His work is about the intricacy and attention to detail that propels her in her own work, artist’s way to artist’s way.

More names fall from her lips – Inno Sotto, her college professor; Joji Lloren, her ongoing tutor in structure and tailoring; and Ruby Roa, a woman, she says, whom she might as well name her collection after. Yvonne loves to see her clothes on Roa, because this particular muse is an unforgettable character to her, exuberant, eccentric, esoteric. They appreciate one another, and Roa cheered her enthusiastically at Yvonne’s turn at the recently held Fashion Week. When Roa wears her clothes, Yvonne’s face lights up with the satisfaction of seeing the final chapter of a creative process that all began with a line from a book.

So at this point you marvel at this girl, and heap praises on her, ready with all the hyperboles you would confer on a true artist, and then you halt in mid-sentence, and realize, well, this is couture, this is fashion, these are just clothes, after all, so perhaps you shouldn’t say such things, and proceed to mumble something about art being serious and fashion being fun. But you just want to do her talent justice. 

And then you wish that only the right kind of woman would ever, ever wear Umma Gumma, the kind of woman who is just as original, just as inimitable, just as thought-provoking. The kind of woman who, upon encountering her, would make you whisper:

"Oh … I don’t think I have met anyone quite like her before."

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Umma Gumma Couture is available at Firma Greenbelt 3. For appointments please call 6310321 or 09202846141 or email ummagummafashion@yahoo.com