MANILA, Philippines - Perhaps fashion designers and dressmakers hold the secret to our truest selves. Given the one-on-one, made-to-order relationship we have with Filipino designers, don’t we reveal to them our deepest insecurities and desires with every request? “Make me appear slimmer.” “I want a look that says ‘sexy’ without trying hard.”
As a fashion designer, Yvonne Quisumbing is known for bringing out the most delicate details in women: in the way her fabric drapes the feminine form, even if she’s slashing it the way she would a blank canvas as in her 4th Philippine Fashion Ball collection back in 2014. However, she is careful to clarify: “I’ve never related my art to my clothes.”
As a multimedia visual artist, her recent work features bird wings (like in her Uniqlo collaboration last year where her work appeared on limited-edition sketchbooks), butterflies (or are they flowers?) drawn and painted in great detail. In “Who Are You Wearing?” she uses her preferred fashion accessory — ornate headgear — to transform the features of the human head in order to reveal an entire world behind it.
Quisumbing admits to her fascination with masking her subjects’ faces. As an artist, her last collection consisted entirely of headdresses, a series called “Visages” last November wherein masks were decorated in a mélange of textures and hues calling to mind wild flora and fauna, suspended in a blank background with nothing to conceal.
“I’m interested in how people I’ve met put on masks, metaphorically speaking, to hide something or to protect themselves. Mostly for their survival or to get to their goals, they have to pretend,” she says.
“Who Are You Wearing?” is a depiction of individual groups of people Quisumbing meets in the circus that is the fashion industry, a documentation of observations that have percolated in her mind since she debuted in 1999. She has scaled down her fashion design practice within her hometown Cebu City in order to focus on her art.
Quisumbing’s figures wear their heart out on their heads. In “Tame,” for instance, the body of a fit woman wearing a bejeweled deep-cut and backless evening gown is depicted with the head of a dressage horse. Aware of the discipline required of great beauties, the proverbial horse blinders come to mind.
She also borrows from mythological, astrological and biblical metanarratives. “Ado” is the wife from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah who looks back and is tragically turned into a pillar of salt, wearing a bare mask in a softer material of cloth — bearing the poverty of having nothing to look forward to — while her back is embellished with crystals. She says of the gems appearing throughout the series: “They can represent what we treasure but also what we choose to show off.”
As with beholding people and making up our own minds about those we meet throughout our lives, Quisumbing leaves the judgment and interpretation to the viewer; these are already hers. She says, “Everything I do when I paint is a reaction.”
But there are things that must be explained, too. The black birds throughout “Who Are You Wearing?” are not ominous crows but black shamas, medium-sized birds with glossy blue-black feathers endemic in Cebu. Once seen everywhere, they are now an endangered species.
You won’t even know they are there at first glance, and even when you do, they’re not what they appear to be. They must be studied up-close and then from a distance; somehow, the details do not sum up the piece’s entirety. For all the aspirational and functional business our appearances make, in “Who Are You Wearing?”, if they reveal the essence of the wearer, they’re not really masks after all, no matter what they are meant to conceal. We’re just not looking hard enough.
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“Who Are You Wearing?” will be on view from July 9 to Aug. 6 at Silverlens Galleries, 2/F YMC Building 2, 2320 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati.
Photos by REGINE DAVID
Produced by DAVID MILAN