STYLEPHILE Kahlea Belonia stands out with her unique beauty
Eccentric local brand Randolf Clothing is back and better and no, it’s not filled with superimposed spoofs of Kim K’s ugly crying face.
“R andolf pokes fun at the obsessive pop culture through clothing,” says the statement welcoming you to their official website, amid a montage of celebrity pap shots from the oughts. The brand’s signature tongue-in-cheek themes are always consistent, almost often winking at the undying love of the masses for entertainment culture. Starting out with their chief creative officer RJ Santos making tees of fashion icons Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld and Grace Coddington’s heads on it, presenting a collection at Amazon Fashion Week in Tokyo and now creating the coolest custom barongs at TernoCon early this year, Randolf is now all grown up.
Their recent collection, Destination: 0 is a sequel of their earlier work, Take Me To Prom two years ago. The previous pieces were all about getting butterflies and going to prom for the first time, but Randolf takes a departure from that. This time, it’s all about being stuck a limbo now that prom is over, high school is done and you have no longer have anything to look forward to. Yes, the quirky patches and embroidery is still there, but this time, Randolf explores more of womenswear and menswear with corsetry, oversized suits, deconstructed boiler suits and of course, more faux tattoo tops and tights. The casting was a stellar lineup too—with notable OGs from different fields such as blogger Tricia Gosingtian, model Jasmine Maierhoffer, photographer duo Ryan and Garovs Vergara of Everywhere We Shoot, and Proud Race’s Pat Mosby and Rik Rasos to name a few. It was revealed later on that the crew was Santos’s inspiration for Destination: 0. Randolf will always be an anti-hero of local fashion, a breath of fresh air in a sea of oversaturated celebrity consumption and a figure of unorthodox methods. You might think in a yearbook, they’d be the Most Unlikely To Succeed because they don’t go by the book, but here they are, crowned with honors, taking a bow after delivering their year-ender speech at the ceremony.