Allen T. Cheng, Hong Kong-based journalist
Filippino women at Banga in Aklan province (Visayas islands) extract fibre from pineapple (piña) leaves.
A piña weaver prepares her loom.
Samples of piña material.
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The second life of a 400-year-old tradition Brought by the Spanish galleons to the Philippines in the 1580s, the pineapple
soon became a major crop in the isles. The variety that prospered then bore a fibrous
fruit with leaves that grew up to two metres, three times longer than the leaves
of today’s edible variety. |
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Fashion tips from the Philippines For those wishing to launch a fashion business, using their own funds or other
sources of investment, Tesoro has this advice: |
Reviving
a piece of fashion heritage, a Filipino housewife creates an alternative sense of
style
Until the late 1980s Patis Tesoro was a housewife and part-time fashion
designer who enjoyed an upper-middle class life in the exclusive neighbourhoods of
San Juan, a town on the outskirts of Manila. Occasionally, she would tailor-make
an outfit for people in her rich circle of friends, and it would bring enough money
to buy the expensive ornaments with which she decorates her spacious home.
But in the aftermath of nation-building that followed the 1986 overthrow of President
Ferdinand Marcos, Tesoro found her true calling as a social activist, entrepreneur,
and leader in development economics. Seeing that ethnic wear was a part of Philippine
identity that was dying out as the result of an invasion of polyester and cotton
goods based on Western design, Tesoro set out to save one humble piece of heritage:
piña, a hand-woven fibre derived from the pineapple leaf, the mainstay of
the traditional ethnic dress called the barong. (See box).
Turning
over a new leaf
More than a decade
later, her designs are de rigueur for Philippine high society. Along the way to success,
Tesoro almost single-handedly helped create thousands of jobs for peasants and weavers
throughout the Philippines. In a country whose per capita GDP is roughly $880 a year,
piña weavers can now earn as much as $200 or $300 a month. Such an income
makes it much more likely that women will stay in the villages and weave piña
rather than go abroad to be domestic servants, who earn salaries ranging from $300
to $400 a month. Though Tesoro had a lot of help from others, she used no capital
except her own pocket money and grants totalling no more than a few million pesos1.
Her story is that of raw determination, strategic lobbying of the right government
officials, and smart marketing at home and abroad. It is also a tale of how the developing
world can transform tradition into business that creates wealth and shores up cultural
identity.
For developing nations, the potential economic rewards alone of building fashion
design and retailing capabilities are enormous. Currently the South is the hub of
textile and clothes manufacturing, Asia being the biggest producer (garments account
for 45 per cent of Hong Kong’s exports) with Latin America now emerging as a player.
But these are largely “low-end” operations where the gross profit margins are fairly
small–perhaps only 10 per cent. The big margins, as much as 200 per cent, go to designers
and retailers, predominantly Western. Ironically in recent years many Western fashion
houses have turned to ethnic themes from Africa, Latin America and Asia for creative
inspiration. In the middle of this supply chain, trading houses that source from
manufacturers and sell to retailers enjoy margins of 20-30 per cent.
If the developing world has thus far been relegated to a sweatshop role, things may
be changing in Asia as the region’s economies get back on track following the 1997
financial crisis, and as indigenous designers discover their abilities.
“We (in Asia) have a wealth of talent emerging, as good as anywhere in the world,”
says Professor Edward Newton, chairman of Hong Kong’s Institute of Textiles and Clothing,
Asia’s biggest such research centre and think tank.
But to realize potential a lot of artistic creativity is needed, as well as a sense
of what sells, gumption, risk-taking and a vision.
“I always felt that we Filipinos were looking for an identity,” says Tesoro at a
coffee shop she’s built adjacent to her museum-like studio, which is filled with
rolls of traditional fabrics and tropical spices. “What we needed to do was to get
back to our roots. We were losing our identity. We were being overwhelmed by Western
civilization.”
Ethnic
roots
Tesoro’s story begins
in the late 1980s. In the euphoria after the downfall of the Marcos regime, Tesoro
and her close friends began a process of soul searching. Many wanted to do something
to contribute to the new republic and decided to look at their ethnic roots: a complex
history of ethnic tribal traditions, flavoured by Spanish and American colonialism.
Along with two other well-connected wealthy friends, Tesoro, now 48 and a mother
of four, opened the Padrones de Casa Manila, a museum that celebrates more than 300
years of Philippine history.
It was then that Tesoro came to realize that many traditional industries were dead
or dying during years of neglect under Marcos. Among them was what once was the pride
and joy of the Philippines: natural fibres. Tesoro was particularly intrigued by
piña cloth, which by that time was nearly impossible to find.
When Tesoro went in 1986 to the Visayas, a set of islands where piña still
grew wild, she found only a handful of part-time weavers–most of them women in their
late 70s or 80s. Clearly piña was going to die with these women, says Tesoro,
who began lobbying local officials to set up courses to train the next generation
of weavers. It took Tesoro nearly two years of lobbying officials before they took
any action.
It was finally only by contacting Victor Ordoñez, Under Secretary of Education,
and Carlos Dominguez, Secretary of Agriculture, that Tesoro was able to convince
the government to take action. In 1988, Tesoro and the Aklan State College of Agriculture
in the Visayas began a series of courses on piña weaving. It took another
year of lobbying government officials for Tesoro to convince the government to put
up more funding to train local farmers to begin cultivating piña again. “It
was not easy,” says Tesoro.
Re-establishing the piña trade was even more difficult. She recalls the first
meeting she held with former growers, weavers, leaf strippers and traders. She asked
why they stopped selling piña. “There was a shouting match,” says Tesoro.
“People blamed each other and the middlemen. What it came down to was the price of
piña was just too low. There wasn’t nearly enough a profit margin for the
industry. People would rather go overseas to be domestic helpers than be weavers.”
Status
symbol
By now, the government’s
Fiber Industry and Development Association was on her side. Together they began setting
up a distribution channel for the piña. In turn, she promised the growers
and weavers that she would buy their supply and also help promote their fabrics nationally
by integrating them into her fashion designs. In fact, it was Tesoro who continually
was willing to pay a higher price for piña at the beginning. By marketing
her piña barongs to her rich friends, Tesoro was able to influence how the
elites of Manila dressed.
Tesoro’s clients list today reads like a Who’s Who of the Philippines: Cory Aquino
and her daughters, former President Fidel Ramos and his wife, President Estrada and
his wife, and almost every major business tycoon in the country. “It is now a status
symbol again,” claims Tesoro, whose outfits sell for as much as $1,000 each.
In fact, it was by enlisting the help of former first lady Amelita Ramos that Tesoro
was not only able to get more funding grants to train both growers and weavers but
also spread the gospel about the importance of piña as a fabric among Philippine
elites. Together, Tesoro, the former first lady, and a few others, founded the Katutubong
Pilipino Foundation, which is dedicated to the revival of traditional Philippine
arts, crafts and culture.
Today, Tesoro is no longer the only buyer of piña. Many younger Filipino designers
are turning to it. In fact, the piña industry today employs more than 2,500
people in the state of Aklan alone, which produced 80,000 metres of piña fabric
in 1998, up from a mere 3,000 metres a year back in 1986. Aklan is the centre of
the piña industry in the Philippines. Here, more than 80 per cent of the country’s
piña products are produced. The industry’s annual turnover is roughly US$1
million a year.
Much of the Philippine’s piña exports began after the Paris Fair of May 1997,
when Tesoro and then first lady Ramos put on a major show to promote traditional
Philippine fibres to the world’s top fashion houses. That show was the re-introduction
of piña to the world. New York-based Filipino-American designer Josie Natori
is now experimenting with piña, for instance. More may be on the way. The
Japanese textile group, Kanebo, for instance, is experimenting for the first time
with the mass manufacturing of piña by mixing its fibres with others.
Newton shares the view that many developing nations will explode on to the world
fashion scene. He is particularly optimistic about India and China, which have the
market girth to produce influential fashion culture and may some day rival the West.
Besides Tokyo, he sees the emergence of Hong Kong and Shanghai as possible rivals
to Milan, Paris and London in the next decade or two.
Hong Kong already plays the pivotal role as the sourcing centre for the entire garment
industry and is also beginning to produce some top fashion design talent. Shanghai
will rise, supported by its growing middle class, which demands not just Western
brands but Chinese ones as well. Indeed, in China today Jeans West is already a leading
domestically-produced blue jean.
Unique
products
“Some day, ‘Made in
China or Hong Kong’ will become a status symbol,” says Newton.
Smaller countries such as the Philippines will have fewer chances of producing name
brands because the home markets in most instances are just too small to give them
global presence. There, says Newton, designers should focus on niche design and products.
“If you don’t have uniqueness, then you have to be competitive in making cheap garments
like any other developing country in the world,” he says.
Finding the right designs however is a huge challenge. Newton believes talented young
designers would do well to study fashion in the West, as did Japan’s Kenzo (Paris)
and Josie Natori (New York).
However, Tesoro’s example suggests breakthroughs are possible by looking inward.
She now hopes to professionalize the Philippines’ natural fibre industry so that
future designers will have more ingredients to use in their ethnic designs.
1. US$ = around 40 pesos.
• The Art of Philippine Embellishment,
by Patis Tesoro (Anvil Publishing Inc., Manila, 1994) traces the history of Philippine
apparel from its native roots to modern times.