FUTURE PERFECT: Perfect Tee

LONDON — Chantal Tee is in the middle of the city’s creative hub, but her mind is in the mountain province. It is one of the fashion trends she conceptualized for fall 2013.

“I twisted it to my migrant experience of looking back home to the Philippines,” she says.

It was for the quintessentially British Burberry. She has been studying fashion design in the city’s Instituto Marangoni.

Last July, the English National Ballet presented “Like a Wish Out of Water,” site-specific performances in which the dancers wore swim caps that Tee and her fellow students made. These projects are all part of the program. Before she enrolled, Tee recalls, “Mind-wise, I had no focus, and I knew that I needed to stand the pressure. I found it here.”

“We’re sheltered back home,” she admits. “Here, you’re left to your own devices. If you don’t know how to do this by now, you have to grow, or you get sucked.” After Tee got her Management Economics degree at Ateneo, her Filipino-Chinese family expected her to work in a bank. By then, however, she had already been involved in fashion through an accessories line called Telebasura.

 “You always see these newspaper and magazine articles on the likes of Amina Aranaz, Mich Dulce — that great dream of traveling, being able to make it on your own. I’m super inspired by that,” she says.

During Tee’s stay so far, she has also done PR for Dulce’s millinery line. Visibly more adventurous now in styling herself, she says, ”I think people who come to London get the sense of freedom that they don’t get anywhere else.”

Chantal giant: Young fashion student Chantal Tee is on the rise, combining minimalism with luxury in her work.

In the acceptance letter she received from the school’s master’s program, it said, “We wish all students were like you.” What it was that they saw she is oblivious about, but she is quite certain of her minimalism. She would gasp remembering how Tom Ford complimented an all-white look she wore at a design forum. It is the same aesthetic coming together in her own line, “like Margiela for H&M,” she says. “I like being pretty and dressed up, but should I wear a ball gown every day? I want a lifestyle that’s accessible and livable.”