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 the way a mixtape is put together, one track at a time and in no particular order.

He tells BLNC the collection started as a pile of personal references. Growing up in Manila, his grandfather's connection to the Air Force, 80s and 90s music, coming-of-age films, and his own experience as a queer Filipino designer. Instead of choosing one, he treated them the way anyone treats a mixtape, "mixing things that feel nostalgic, personal, and familiar into something that feels distinctly mine."

The clothes carry all of it at once. Cord is looped and knotted across bare skin in long wave patterns, tops built out of rope more than fabric. Fringe falls in heavy curtains from wide, low-slung waistbands. Dyed bands run vertically down tanks and trousers, and other sets are marked over with rough diagonals. Edges are left raw and frayed on purpose. The bags come soft and oversized, slung low or carried in both arms.

He describes his creative identity as taking ordinary references from around him and reinterpreting them through a personal, contemporary lens. That is harder than it sounds. Design here has spent a long time being asked to prove itself by pointing at the obvious, and Malabad trusts that the ordinary is already enough, that a street and a song and a family story can hold a runway all by themselves.

What he wants from it is bigger than the clothes. He hopes people leave thinking about the things that shaped them, the clothes they grew up seeing, the music they listened to, the places that still feel familiar. He wants Kill Joy Studios to stay a work in progress, "a journal that documents how I see the world," and he wants other people to build from their own lives instead of borrowing somebody else's.

A young designer put the things that made him on a runway and made the case that anyone's list would do. Somebody else's mixtape is next.