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 tonight.

RJ spent four days there in January. His grandfather passed away, and before the family had finished grieving, his niece Sari was born. Nobody could stop wondering about it, so they said it out loud instead, asking each other whether the two of them had somehow already met.

The Waiting Room, the second MNL Fashion Week collection for his label Randolf, is his answer. "I imagined a waiting room that exists somewhere between the real and the unreal, where memories, hope, and uncertainty all coexist," he tells BLNC. He has described it as a meeting between two souls, one on the way to heaven and the other on the way to Earth.

The set made it literal. At the end of the runway stood a pair of double doors, the kind that swing open at the front of an operating room, and every model came through them.

Flowers run through the pieces, because flowers are what people bring to funerals and hospital rooms alike. They arrive blown up across a sheer babydoll dress, photographs of blooms set into rings of colored tulle like framed pictures nobody has taken down. They come printed small and repeating across a high-necked top, like wallpaper in a house somebody grew up in, and elsewhere they are cut from fabric and sewn on one at a time, gathering along a hem the way they gather on a casket.

Sheer black tiers swing out from a slip dress. Striped denim is cut into hearts and stitched onto a zip jacket. Tattoo motifs are embroidered onto skin-toned mesh, birds and stars where a real tattoo would sit. A tulle veil carries the brand name across the eyes, roses stitched at the temple. The silhouettes run big and soft, closer to something a child would be swallowed by than anything cut to fit.

RJ had gone looking for a flower named after his niece and found one, the Iris Sari. At the show, the Goo Goo Dolls came through the speakers, a ballad everybody has known since they were young and nobody had ever once heard as being about a baby girl born four days after a death.

"I hope people leave thinking about the stories they carry with them," RJ tells BLNC. "We all experience moments of waiting, uncertainty, loss, or change, but we rarely stop to reflect on them." Most people survive a week like his and carry it quietly for the rest of their lives. He made his into a room and let a city sit in it.

Sari is too young to remember any of this. One day she will find the video, where she will hear her song playing, see the doors, and understand that in the week she arrived, her uncle filled a runway with flowers for her and for a grandfather she will only ever know through stories. Grief can be beautiful, if somebody is willing to do the work. That is what love looks like when the person doing the loving happens to be an artist. It does not bring anybody back, it just refuses to let them go.