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 adults would be comfortable, and then the pressure telling her she had to be more masculine to earn liking a girl. "I didn't have to be masculine, I didn't have to be 'passing,'" she tells BLNC.

Queer Notes is what she built out of that. The ideas go back to fashion school, to a batch that lost its graduation show to the pandemic. She built it around four emotions, grief, anger, defiance, and becoming, and she tells BLNC the hard part was fitting all four into one short lineup.

The words are written straight onto the clothes. Michelle Dee opened the show in a sheer nude look marked over and over with tibo, the Filipino insult once used to make masculine lesbians feel smaller, long since taken back, written here large enough to be proud of. Elsewhere Lesbyana runs across a sheer cropped top in the same loose handwriting, carried rather than dodged.

Everything around those words refuses to be sad. Corsets lace up the front in peach and pink, black pieces are strung over with white thread that spreads like a web, and there are enormous faux fur hats in mint and pastel pink, veils, tulle, and skirts built for room. Queer and trans women walked it, which widens the story past one girlhood. It is avant-garde in the most inviting way, romantic and a little ridiculous, which is where her maximalism works best.

The designer arrived here the long way too. She studied clothing technology at UP and worked as a stylist first, carrying that as an insecurity for years, convinced styling canceled out being a designer. She tells BLNC that letting herself be both is what set her free. "Femininity has no gender," she says, adding that a person does not have to be queer to understand it, that it is something felt from the inside that wants to come out.

One word is left, and it is the one she chose herself. She hopes to build her legacy on being body positive and on embracing what she calls your hubadera-ness, from hubad, meaning naked, the word women here get called for showing skin. A girl who spent her childhood covering up wrote a slur across her opening look and named her whole future after the insult she likes best.

She is not asking for tolerance or for a seat at the edge of the industry. She is building work where the words used against queer women become the material, where lace and boning read as survival rather than decoration, and where any girl who learned to shrink can see herself at full size. Some will find their own name in this collection. She made it for them, and made it beautiful on purpose.