The Eccentric Life
It just takes one look at Juliana Santos-Garrett to understand why she chose the name Eccentrics for her accessory line. With her shock of spiky, short white hair, Juliana, clearly, is not your everyday, garden-variety designer. She comes from a family whose women had an artistic inclination towards jewelry. She counts her mother, Virginia Luna-Santos, as a jewelry-making inspiration. Like their mother, Juliana’s sister Virginia loved jewelry and would share this love with her youngest sibling.
“I have always been interested and drawn to eccentric forms and shapes. Jewelry to a woman is the extension of her aura and personality. Like punctuation marks to a sentence. The pieces that one chooses to embellish herself with says something about her without uttering a word,” shares Juliana, whose Eccentric pieces will be showcased at the Fora FilipinaZ at The Fifth at Rockwell events hall on Plaza Drive, Rockwell Center, Makati City from Oct. 11 to 13.
Eccentrics is known for its use of carabao and local goat horns as main mediums for its collection.
To Juliana, the choice of this native material was a way of reminding Filipinos about their roots. “Carabao and Filipino goat horns represent Philippine culture and silent determination of the Filipino people. In using local horns as raw material, I start by cutting the horn in pieces so that I can transform them from the recognizable to the unique. It is from these pieces that I play with the shapes, shades and sizes as though they were lines in a sketch. Once the picture is complete, they are strung together like notes to a tune.”
As to her design inspirations, this Marymount Manhattan College graduate explains, “Design inspiration comes from my own sense of style and tastes. I am not one to look to others for epiphanies. My pieces are a reflection of myself.”