“Sinulog Fashion Festival”
By: Yasunari Ramon Suarez Taguchi
The creations of Cebu’s Dexter Alazas, Brian Aloquin, Peewee Senining, Francis Duane, Alden Duterte and the homegrown A Line by Dexter Alazas and GPA Lifestyle + Clothing marquees top-billed the inaugural staging of a Sinulog Festival season fashion show.
Billed “Sinulog Fashion Festival 2024” and staged at the Atrium of Robinsons Galleria Cebu last January 20 (the Friday before the Sinulog Grand Parade), the runway event underscored what Sinulog seasondressing means to a number of the metro’s highly-sought after designers this year, apart from encapsulating the radiance and warmth that has become indicative of the Sinulog in wearable tenses and terms.
As the first installment of a forthcoming series of annual Sinulog-themed fashion shows, the event largely filled the Sinulog fashion show gap that was caused by the pandemic.
Outside of this, however, the runway event infused some revisions to the idea of Sinulogspecific dressing by presenting pieces that run with the conceptual-cum-practical trends that’re foreseen to go big as fashion’s game changers in 2024.
Several fashion industry insiders and pundits have weighed in on what’s bound to be trendy in 2024, citing the preppy trend, the “wrong shoe theory”, the “softening of shapes” and integrations of Romantic themes.
In “Sinulog Fashion Festival”, viewers were gifted with glimpses of how these forecasts would pan out from the point of view of a Cebuano designer.
From pieces
that bore ivy league design elements like sports team uniform lines, to ensembles that intentionally combine opposing color combinations in the spirit of molding a sense of aesthetic balance, the show’s presented pieces did well in framing how the creative visions of Cebuano designers are aligned with global fashion forecasts.
But of the many forecasts that the show plied on, it was the “softening of shapes” concept that it complemented on – the “softening of shapes” being a trend that’s foreseen to go big as a handbag design standard in 2024.
Basically, several fashion industry insiders feel that 2024’s handbag design leanings will veer towards the practical and the effortless, with handbags likely to be made more appealing to those with travel-ready wardrobes. Though the show didn’t exactly feature handbags, it did present clothes that fall in the travel-ready wardrobe cachet, and this aspect to the show said something about how progressive the views of Cebuano designers are.