Not your momma's piña

MANILA, Philippines - A lot of local fashion shows function as designer showcases, one-off events that are an excuse to get dolled up and drink and perhaps order new outfits straight off the (model’s) rack. Once in a while, there’s a driving vision behind the production, whether it’s a celebration of an era in the business, a fundraising event for a worthwhile foundation, or, like Fashion Forecast, a partnership with a textile producer, bringing to the foreground the industry behind the finished glamour. This year, Fashion Forecast worked with Piñagayon, a piña fabric maker from Daet, Camarines Norte. Piña is traditionally a festive fabric, brought out at weddings and baptisms. Its rare and fine quality makes it the most expensive of all Philippine hand-woven fabrics, and designers like Lulu Tan-Gan have already made significant efforts to bring it out of the baul and modernize the material with contemporary and casual designs, even combining them with other fabrics to create innovative new looks.

“Fashion Forecast believes in Filipino talent, expression and dedication,” says creative director Josh Santos. “The show aims to help uplift the lives of the people responsible for the production of the local fabrics we will be featuring every year. The challenge for the designers is to make a trend out of their unique treatments of the piña fabric, and the big goal is to raise awareness of the buying public about how versatile and contemporary the piña cloth is.” He hopes the designs will create desire and demand for the fabric, in effect supporting the livelihoods of piña weavers.

Pineapple plantation owners Flora and Marco Abadesco, a mother and son tandem, wanted to keep everything in their farm integrated and sustainable. They made use of everything — pineapple peels as fertilizer and the cores for cattle and feed. The leaves, they figured, could be used for garments, and Piñagayon was born. But they couldn’t supply all the fabric for Fashion Forecast on their own, so they got in touch with other pineapple producers in the province. “There are currently 3,000 hectares of pineapple farms in the province, but the main product has always been the fruit,” says Ernie Pardo, provincial director of the Department of Trade and Industry in Camarines Norte. “Now we are encouraging all the plantation owners to stop throwing the leaves. We are raising awareness that every leaf of the piña is a money-making opportunity.”

Unemployed persons and prison inmates have been hired to knot the fibers, a labor-intensive process, and local students make some money scraping the leaves by hand, enabling them to save up for their graduation expenses. Says Espero, “I told the co-op that we can’t back out of this anymore because of social responsibility. I really hope that this is our breakthrough.”