Take your high fashion inspiration from the beat on the streets
(published in Metro magazine)
There are the catwalks…and then there are the sidewalks. Style-savvy people have always sought inspiration in unusual places and a city’s avenues and side streets are some of the best places to source for innovative fashion ideas. From The Material Girl to The Sartorialist, the streets have always provided people with some of the most fashion forward takes on style. So whether it’s people watching in another country, or scouring the sidewalk bazaars that have sprouted all over Manila, taking your fashion cues from real life puts an unexpected twist to the oftentimes glitzy, glamorous face of fashion.
Gritty & glitzy
Adding a little funk to the fabulous keeps fashion from being too precious. This is why most luxury fashion houses add flavor to their collections with trends picked up from the street. Whether it’s mixing denim with your couture, adding a little grunge to the rustle of silk taffeta, or shredding a perfectly tailored suit, adding a touch of “street” to refined pieces gives it more edge.
Beauty of a bargain
There’s nothing like the thrill of digging through bazaar bins and finding a beautiful piece for next to nothing! Even kitschy pieces can have a beauty all their own when worn with the right attitude. Knowing how to mix and match your designer pieces with bargain items, like piling plastic brooches on a custom-designed taffeta trench, or wearing sidewalk-bought hammered-tin earrings with an embroidered silk dress, creates a fashion look that’s distinctive and fresh.
Strut your stuff
Individual style is less a product of following trends and more a result of marching to the beat of your own fashion drum. Street style has a way of grounding fashion’s fantasies into reality and making it more credible and better suited to its surroundings. Some of the most imaginative style pairings have come from form meeting function on the style arena of bustling city streets.
From the pedestal to the pedestrian
Inspiration is everywhere, if you just take the time to look around. Exotic and glamorous locales notwithstanding, most street corners in Manila offer a boundless source of ideas. From the riot of colors to the mix of textures, the collage of shapes to the play of lights, visual stimuli are in abundance and even the lowly “trapo” or jeepney can be interesting jump-off points for creating some unique fashion pieces.
*Metallic & colored ribbon Jeepney dress from “Not by the Book” exhibit