Barong Perfecting the
By: Yasunari Ramon Suarez Taguchi Fashion’s affinity with pageantry once again took a nuanced turn in Cebu this May with the many beauty tilt preliminaries and finals nights that were held within the month.
From several candidate press presentations to the successful staging of various regional legs, Cebu’s established and up-and-coming designers have been busy dressing many pageantry misters and misses in turn.
One of the more noteworthy of fashion-meets-pageantry events took place last May 12 during the course of this year’s one-nite-only Gabii Sa Kabilin. Billed the “Barong Filipino” pre-pageant night of Ginoong Pilipinas 2023, it was held at the Casa Gorordo Museum grounds, and it drew all sights to a series of barongs that were conceptualized to push for contemporary iterations of the traditional Barong Tagalog.
The brainchild of Ginoong Pilipinas 2023 executive producer Dexter Alazas, the event mainly had the Ginoong Pilipinas 2023 entrants model a curated set of barongs that were made with a mix of traditional and contemporary fabrics like polycotton.
As a highlight of this year’s holding of the pageant (which had its finals night last May 20), the occasion was primed as a standalone feature that stitched an inclusive quality to the traditional “Barong Tagalog” as “Barong Filipino” through a novel use of fabrics that made for more contemporary, future-forward designs.
Presented in two parts, the first part of the event had the Ginoong Pilipinas 2023 entrants model barongs that were made by designers affiliated with the Cebu campus of the Fashion Institute of the Philippines. The second part had the gentlemen model barongs that were made by designers of their choosing, and the ensembles presented in both segments largely ran by the perfecting, as opposed to needlessly reinventing principle in design.
In the compendium of design concepts and mores, the “perfecting, as opposed to reinventing principle” often uses the wheel as an example – arguing that there’s no point trying to reinvent the wheel because its core design has worked for centuries. Perfecting it, however, is another story. Given the barong’s endearing standing as the formalwear item for men in Filipiniana couture, the occasion brought it upon itself to tread into what can be had in perfecting the barong as opposed to needlessly reinventing it – priming it as the “Barong Filipino” that blends the de facto with the de jure in molding something that’s altogether new.