Proudrace on the powerful women who influence them and '90s shows that made them

MANILA, Philippines - Proudrace designers Pat Mosby and Rik Rasos reminisce about the charms of House of Style and how skate subculture and religious garb influenced their latest collection.

1. We’ve always been frustrated skaters. When we were teenagers, we were surrounded by a lot of skaters. We did try to skate for a few years but eventually grew out of it. However, it left a huge effect on our personal style. The relaxed look and laidback style of skaters inspired the shapes and silhouettes of our spring/summer ‘12 collection. It’s a little throwback to our teenage youth.

2. After school we remember House Of Style on MTV around 4 p.m. Until this day, Shalom Harlow is one of our favorite models. That was the first time that we fell in love with a model. In the past few years the movement of supermodels as superstars has made a comeback. We love models with big personalities, and their personal styles are often a reference when we create women’s pieces.

3. Leather is a staple for the label. Right now we’re into kidskin, the really soft and raw kind. We love the smell and the way that it drapes. We’re also using young cowhide in metallic hues for accessories this season.

4. Mixing preppy and grunge is kind of our go-to look lately. It definitely contributed to the styling of the lookbook. It brought a different angle in putting together the looks this season.

5. The Nanny! Remember Fran Drescher? There is a blog called “Should be on The Nanny” where Fran’s (and sometimes CC Babcock’s) face is Photoshopped on different popular runway looks ranging from Mary Katranzou to Givenchy couture. It’s hilarious. It’s very subtle but we incorporated an homage to that comedy series in our lookbook.

6. Religious groups and their uniform dressing is always a mystery to us. We took a lot of inspiration from that and used some elements in our looks, i.e. the long skirts and covered-up look.

7. Listening to Joy Division, Interpol and Bon Iver probably contributed a lot to how dark the new collection is. In spring and summer everyone expects you to wear pastels and florals; we wanted to show how you can rock an all-black look, it’s an alternative to how mainstream fashion usually translates. Listening to Madonna’s “Immaculate Collection” CD actually gave this collection the right amount of fun that it needed to perk it up.

8. Girls and women, powerful, stylish cute and sexy women. We love hearing from them and hanging out with them. It’s always nice to hear that they can wear our clothes over and over and that it does not choose seasons. Until now we still see people wearing our pieces from our first collection and that is amazing. We just wanna make clothes that can be people’s fashion staples, their go-to clothes.

9. Obviously we love black. Ninety percent of our own clothes are in black. We always go back to black; it was a natural transition from our very light-colored collection last season.

10. Someone once told us that our clothes are like a blank canvas. We’re advocates of minimalism. We love it. It’s actually a total opposite of our workroom, which is really cluttered. The idea of people making our clothes their own is always appealing to us. We’re so excited to see how it is styled differently and how different it would look with just adding the right accessories.

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For more info, visit www.proudrace.com.