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Sneak peak into the designers' collections

MACO CUSTODIO
Footwear

Independent luxury footwear designer, works out of his home city: an urban-planned
capital with dystopic specks. Graduating with a degree in Industrial Design, he
parlayed the academic preparation to return to his family's shoe-making enterprise—
however immediately creating his own markedly distinct look and line. A member of
the Fashion Design Council of the Philippines, Maco Custodio derives both energy and
insight from collaborations with media, theater, film and television practitioners. For IFS,
Maco stretched his imagination to explore dystopic/utopic blendings of bespoke
shoemaking, usage of industrial tetrapak throw-aways, his dog's death; and the idea
of Frankensteinianbody re-membering.

MICKI OLAGUER
Jewelry

Graduated with honors from Fine Arts education, apprenticed with a famed jeweller,
and secured a scholarship with the Gemological Institute of America. At 23, she is the
youngest at IFS 2016, but commits to the most traditional spirit. Thus herself embodying
utopian U-turning, Micki deploys a homing instinct to inevitable returns to her family
jewelry aesthetic, after she detoured, via the curatorial preparation, into previously
unfamiliar terrains of gold's relation to small-scale mining with disastrous techniques.
At the end of the detour, she returns to the utopic zone of mother-of-pearl, a material
with no known dystopic context.

THIAN RODRIGUEZ
Apparel

Thian Rodriguez takes up bullets and leather, which in the Philippines are re-purposed
for musical instruments during non-conflict times (U-turning into munitions and boots
when times are bad), with calm interest. His gumption to explore the materials of
extreme dystopia, comes from an organic artistry that draws from life as bricolage of
random encounters with from the art world, local ambition, and the
extraordinarily dense cyberzone in which the country exists in a frenzied state. Thian
gathers disparate ephemera with a masterful way with construction; and clearly
derives pleasure from refiguring or rescuing the "sexy" from the melee.

JARED SERVANO
Apparel

Jared Servano grew up in the southernmost city of the Philippines, where the quotidian
experience is shaped by the activities of tuna fishers, pineapple plantation workers,
indigenous peoples, and settlers from the country's north. He began a life in design as
an art teacher at primary school, but quickly shifted to fashion with increasing success
at local and then national competition. Jared is seduced by the materials and
proclivities of indigenous culture: tiny, polychromatic beads used enmasse; ikat-dyeing;
and the full-bodied outcomes of weaving with the bastfiber abakå. For IFS London,
Jared re-worked his enduring inclinations to sculpt abakå into a local statement of the
global gown form.