Proudrace Closed MNL Fashion Week 2026 With a Love Letter to Construction

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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, packed with whatever clothing would keep the breakables safe. He cut those up and made them into something else. He has been doing a version of that ever since.

"As a child, I would deconstruct and rebuild objects, fabric, paper, even clay, driven by curiosity about how things are made and transformed," he tells BLNC. "That instinct for experimentation still anchors my practice."

Proudrace closed MNL Fashion Week 2026, the last show of four days, and the collection came out of that same instinct. He built it around extending the life of a garment rather than making one from nothing. "I was drawn to how fabric naturally falls," he tells BLNC. "Curtain folds, incidental drapes, and everyday movement."

The Adidas collaboration runs through the whole collection and the proof of it is everywhere, three stripes cut apart and stitched back into track jackets that have been split down the middle, recombined with denim panels. A brown pair of track pants comes out with nothing above it, the model's body covered instead in temporary tattoos. One coat is a patchwork of faux fur in brown and grey and cream over faded denim, the kind of thing that should not work and then does. A white lace tank ends in a long fringe at the hip. A pink striped dress falls past the knee over dark jeans. And then a tote comes out, printed and bright, and it looks exactly like a sako bag. Every Filipino knows a sako bag. It is in the kitchen, at the palengke, in the back of the car during province trips, stuffed into balikbayan boxes. It has carried groceries and pasalubong and entire childhoods, and nobody has ever once called it fashion. Rik put one on a runway next to an Adidas duffel bag, and it held its own.

None of this is where the brand started. Proudrace came out of Manila's underground in 2012, and that energy never left, but the focus has moved toward craft and everyday Filipino life. "Instead of looking outward, we now look inward," he tells BLNC, "translating lived experiences into a contemporary fashion language."

That is what he wants people to take home. "Our roots and shared experiences are not limitations but foundations for innovation," he tells BLNC. Proudrace is the first Filipino fashion label to collaborate with Adidas, and before that the clothes found their way to BTS, Grimes, A$AP Rocky, and Alison Wonderland. He does not talk about legacy. He talks about possibilities. If the journey helps one young creative believe a Filipino brand can exist globally without giving up who it is, he says, that already means something.

And it is not over. Proudrace shows again at Bench Fashion Week Holiday 2026 on September 26 and 27 at One Ayala in Makati, this time with Human.

Somewhere in Legarda there was a boy in his aunt's shop learning where the seams meet. He never stopped. He just kept going, kept cutting, kept rebuilding, kept loving the work long before anyone was watching, and now a whole country gets to wear what that love turned into.