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Azariah: A Shadow Pantheon
Night holds an antagonistic shadow that can shatter the mask of conformity that we present to the world as our own protection; In the night, we reclaim the omnipotent shadow that lingers tentatively in our wake. On the border of the light and dark of these shadows, Apollo Bual, creative director of Azariah: a shadow pantheon, reveals the essence of recognizing and identifying with these shadows–our true, ominous forms. Bual’s conceptual reimagining of Azaraiah: A Shadow Pant


RANDOLF x Plains & Prints Reimagines Everyday Dressing
RANDOLF and Plains & Prints unite in a 34-piece collection by RJ Santos, blending playful textures, contemporary silhouettes, and modern interpretations of Filipino dressing.


Paris Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027: The New Language of Luxury
By BLNC Magazine Paris Fashion Week has always understood the power of spectacle. But Spring/Summer 2027 feels less interested in simply putting on a show and more interested in asking what fashion is supposed to mean now. With the luxury industry navigating changing consumer habits, designer movements and an increasingly complicated relationship with excess, Paris has responded with collections that move between glamour and restraint, exposure and protection, heritage and re


Proudrace x Human's I LOVE U Finds a Runway Inside the Filipino Home
In I LOVE U, Rik Rasos takes the things sitting inside every Filipino home and puts them on a body. By Kobe Janer October 1, 2026 Rik Rasos, the creative director behind Proudrace, has always made clothes out of the things people already know. His references come from the neighborhood and the house, things everyone recognizes instantly. For I LOVE U, his collaboration with Human for BENCH Fashion Week Holiday 2026, he went further into the familiar. A table cover, the kind th


Edwin Ao's Chlorophyll Hexagons Is a Quiet Lesson in the Art of Letting Go
At BENCH Fashion Week Holiday 2026, the Cebuano designer uses solar printing and sharp tailoring to show what happens when a garment learns how to remember. By Kobe Janer October 1, 2026 Edwin Ao is a fine arts graduate of the University of San Carlos, a renowned Cebuano fashion designer, and an instructor at the UP Cebu College of Communication, Art, and Design. He has shown in Paris, Tokyo, and Singapore, and if there is a constant in his work it is that every line has a re


DEAD HUNGRY FOR LOVE
For Ian Pangilinan, stepping behind the camera means entering a world where fantasy, animation, and love take on new forms. Alongside director Carl Joseph Papa and co-star Khalil Ramos, he ventures into the unknown with Patay Gutom, a film that blurs the line between the living and the dead. This September, Ian Pangilinan enters a new chapter of his creative life, taking on the role of actor-director in Patay Gutom, a fantasy BL film directed alongside Carl Joseph Papa. Bring


Proudrace Closed MNL Fashion Week 2026 With a Love Letter to Construction
Rik Rasos puts Proudrace on a runway the way a person puts their whole heart on a table, open and unbothered about what happens next. By Kobe Janer Rik Rasos learned to love clothes in two rooms. One was his aunt's tailoring shop near his childhood home in Legarda, where he helped out in exchange for being taught, and where he first fell for the way a pattern becomes a garment. The other was wherever his family opened the balikbayan boxes his father sent home from abroad, pac


Randolf's The Waiting Room Was Built in the Space Between an Ending and a Beginning
For his second MNL Fashion Week collection, RJ Santos built a room where an ending and a beginning could sit down together. By Kobe Janer Everyone knows the room. The lights are too bright and never go off, the air smells of antiseptic, and somebody's tita is asleep sitting up in the corner. Waiting is the part nobody tells stories about afterward, because nothing happens in it. It is only the hours a family spends between what was true this morning and what will be true toni


Puregold CinePanalo 2026: Seven Films, Seven Ways of Seeing Filipino Life
From magical road trips and accidental hitmen to ghosts, first love, family, and the quiet weight of mortality, Puregold CinePanalo 2026 brings together seven Filipino stories that refuse to stay in one genre. Filipino cinema has always found a way to make the extraordinary feel close to home. A carabao can become a companion on a journey to Manila. A ghost can become the object of someone's affection. A thousand-peso birthday errand can turn into a moral dilemma. And somewhe


Kill Joy Studios Builds a Whole Collection Out of Everything Eugene Malabad Loves
Kalye Trez Mixtape is Eugene Malabad's real debut, assembled from Manila, his grandfather, and the films he grew up on. By Kobe Janer Nobody becomes themselves from one thing. It is a song, a street, a film watched too young, a grandparent's old stories, all of it layered until a person is the sum of whatever they happened to love. Eugene Malabad built a collection on exactly that. Kalye Trez Mixtape had its runway at MNL Fashion Week 2026 for Kill Joy Studios, put together t


Yana Kalaw's Queer Notes Is a Girlhood Refusing to Shrink
An ode to embracing her own femininity, Queer Notes is the collection Yana Kalaw waited years to show. By Kobe Janer Plenty of Filipino kids learn early that there is a version of themselves the adults prefer. They work out which parts to keep quiet at family lunch, and they get good at it long before they know what they are doing. Yana Kalaw grew up a queer girl in a conservative Catholic world, caught between two sets of rules. There was pressure to seem straight so the adu


At MNL Fashion Week 2026, Lilah Roché Hands the Manila Noir Over to a Woman
In Sampaguita Queenpin, Jayanne Santos takes the Manila noir she was raised on and hands it to somebody it was never written for. By Kobe Janer There is a particular kind of Filipino nostalgia that lives inside a television set. The same shows every night, the volume too loud, the whole family in one room, and the kids on the floor taking it in without knowing any of it would stay. Jayanne Santos grew up on her parents' action films from the late 1960s through the early 1980s


Yong Studio Watches the Color Drain Out of Nature at MNL Fashion Week 2026
The label's largest collection yet opens in full bloom and ends in dry earth, and Yong Davalos would rather talk about what is already here. By Kobe Janer The country has spent the last few years living inside its own weather. Storms arrive stronger and more often, El Niño dries out the fields, floods take the same neighborhoods twice, and the conversation moves on before anything is fixed. Fashion almost never says anything about it. Yong Studio said something. At 7 p.m. on


Nicolò Opens MNL Fashion Week 2026 With Flow State, a Love Letter to the Work Itself
For his debut on the MNL Fashion Week runway, Nicolo Perez builds Flow State around three Greek myths and the question of how much wanting is too much. By Kobe Janer At 5 p.m. on Thursday, Nicolò opened MNL Fashion Week 2026 with a collection that begins in labor and ends in flight. It was the label's first time on this calendar, and the opening show sets a week's temperature. Flow State takes its name from psychology, though the term is only a label for something most people


Proudrace Closes MNL Fashion Week 2026 with a Collection Built on Draping, Reconstruction and the First Filipino Fashion Collaboration with adidas
The label that started as Filipino streetwear closes the festival with couture-inspired construction and a runway it describes as crazy, sexy, chic. Michele Dee walked as muse. TAGUIG CITY, PHILIPPINES — 06 September 2026 — Proudrace closed MNL Fashion Week 2026 at SMX Aura this evening with a collection built on draping, proportion and reconstruction, pushing the label into couture-inspired construction techniques new to the studio. “My fascination with garment construc


Charlotte Folk Turns the Runway into a Hotel at MNL Fashion Week 2026, Finding the Expressiveness in the Mundane
The label opened Day Three with a show built around people moving in and out of a hotel, a collection about diversity, individuality and everyday life shown a little more elevated. Skusta Clee and Flow G performed. TAGUIG CITY, PHILIPPINES — 05 September 2026 — Charlotte Folk opened the third night of MNL Fashion Week 2026 at SMX Aura this evening with a runway staged as a hotel, following different individuals moving in and out of its doors. “We’re really going all out


PENSHOPPE x ABAKADA: Filipino Streetwear Finds Its Way Home
From Chicago to Manila, PENSHOPPE Designer Lab’s first collaboration turns Filipino identity into a contemporary streetwear conversation. Filipino identity has never belonged to just one place. It travels with us, changes with its surroundings, and finds new ways to speak. In streetwear, that conversation becomes even more personal. This October, PENSHOPPE opens a new chapter with PENSHOPPE Designer Lab: ABAKADA, a 23-piece limited-edition collaboration with Chicago-based Fil


STUDIO TOMBOY Appoints WOOYOUNG as the First Global Ambassador
WOOYOUNG, member of global K-pop group ATEEZ, has been named the first global ambassador of STUDIO TOMBOY, a fashion brand operated by Shinsegae Tomboy Co., Ltd. The partnership follows the successful campaign STUDIO TOMBOY launched with WOOYOUNG early this summer. Products featured by WOOYOUNG in the campaign sold out shortly after release, while his everyday styling, seen through airport appearances and personal social media, also drew significant attention. His individual


GOT THE MEMO? MEMO LAUNCHES CORPCORE THAT DOESN'T TIME OUT
MEMO redefines modern workwear for the desk-to-drinks generation, spotlighting real professionals across different industries across the Philippines. MEMO, the modern workwear brand under the Golden ABC portfolio, today launches GOT THE MEMO, its latest campaign built around a simple idea: style shouldn't clock out when the workday does. Running through the end of September, the campaign champions corpcore that doesn't time out, workwear sharp enough for the boardroom and ea


BLNCArchive: Freestyle, Finding Freedom Through Fashion and Photography
For Nina Eiisa , fashion is more than following what is trending. It is a language of individuality, a reflection of personality, and a response to the world around us. At 25, the Manila-based photographer has already carved out her own creative space, bringing together fashion, portraiture, and entrepreneurship through a distinctly understated visual style. A graduate of Enderun Colleges with a degree in Entrepreneurship, Villanueva pursued her passion for photography furthe
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