Widely acclaimed as one of the most original and important Filipino visionaries in fashion today, Mich Dulce has won many awards and recognition internationally for her designs as well as her craftsmanship in creating clothes and hats— her most recent being the top prize in the International Young Creative Fashion Entrepreneur from The British Council. She trained at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London College of Fashion, the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and apprenticed with designers like Marjan Pejoski & Jessica Ogden. The designer continues to work with traditional Filipino materials, particularly Piña, a fabric made of pineapple fiber, and T’nalak, a handmade material using abaca fiber made by the women of the T’Boli Peoples of Lake Sebu in South Cotobato, Philippines. Choosing to use this precious fabric, the designer is interweaving stories from a different tradition, retelling them with her own aesthetic while retaining a respect for their origins. Not ending with the weave, each headpiece is handmade by women from the Gawad Kalinga Community Development Foundation, a Philippine-based poverty alleviation and nation building movement, who are personally trained and are supervised by Dulce. “Traditional tinalak fabric weaving and designs have been a part of the T’Boli culture (and is) traditionally used for special occasions, with each design bearing a distinct meaning known only to these peoples,” explains Dulce. "The fabric and the craft in making it are an essential part of their heritage, a tapestry of the tribe’s own history and traditions. By using this in my work, I wanted to create a new subculture within that culture.
5 photographs above by Everywhere We Soot

Models are having a break while FACADES is reviewing London Men SS13. You'll see it all in FACADES issue, but you can already get a flavour of it in our Fashion Video Gallery.
Photo credit: JEJ