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, and she still watches the remakes with them now. Manila after dark, tailored suits, street loyalties, sampaguita sellers at the church doors. "So I thought, why not make a female version," she tells BLNC. Sampaguita Queenpin, her collection for the label Lilah Roché, is that thought carried through.

Both halves of the title carry their own history here. The sampaguita is the national flower, sold in thin strands outside churches and understood to mean purity and devotion. Asiong Salonga was a real Tondo gang leader who died young in 1951 and became a permanent figure of Philippine action cinema, most famously through Fernando Poe Jr. One is a girl holding flowers at the church door. The other runs the street outside it. Jayanne put them in the same body and let the collection travel from one to the other.

The clothes carry both. A black blazer is worn as a dress, with a wide ivory lapel and shoulders cut sharp and square. A shorter version of the same jacket ends at the ribs, over high-waisted trousers pulled tight by drawstrings tipped in metal. Underneath is corsetry, stiff bodices that grip the waist and flare at the hip. One short dress has a single white sleeve falling past the hand. Elsewhere the tailoring loosens, like the black column dress cut open at the hip with panels hanging free. The look everyone remembers came in ivory, a long lean silhouette under a wide white hat, with a cascading garland of sampaguita held in both hands. The flower stands for purity here, offered on altars and to saints. She put it in the hands of a woman who had already taken power. The whole collection lives in the pull between clothes that hold their shape and clothes that let go of it.

The designer arrived at tailoring the long way. She started the label in 2019, in her first year of college, and moved through hardcore denim, harajuku, and weave craft before finding her direction about three years ago. Tailoring is where she landed, and she is clear about why it matters. It is a male-dominated field, she tells BLNC, and women in fashion get boxed in as eye candy or as people who can only slap fabric together. "Women can be engineers and directors of clothes too," she says.

The process itself was the surprise, she tells BLNC. She could not fully plan the looks, so she built as she went, thinking, drafting the pattern, then playing until it became something. What she wants remembered is not the story or the silhouettes but the part nobody sees. She finishes the insides of her garments with the same care as the outside, because the insides matter too. "It is my art and I am the artist of it. So look inside my clothes and see my passion just from there."

Sampaguita Queenpin follows a girl from the church steps to the woman who runs the street, and the designer walked a version of the same road to get here. Jayanne grew up watching men carry those films. This time she wrote the part, directed it, and walked on as the star, then finished the inside of every garment where nobody would think to look.