Supporting traditional textiles can fuel agriculture

**media[27414]**AVANT GARDENEREarlier this week, I was invited to an Artefino fashion show, a preview of Heir Loom, designer Jor-El Espina’s take on Filipiñana using piña fabric from the grand dame of Filipiñana fashion Patis Tesoro’s personal collection. The show was a creative fusion of heritage and contemporary, a reintroduction of piña to old and new audiences alike.Tesoro isn’t just one of the most prominent names in Philippine fashion. She is also a textile designer and scholar, and a permaculture farmer. We’ve featured her Laguna farm in Agriculture magazine. I sat down to talk with her son, Raffy Tesoro, who himself is a textile designer and scholar as well as an agri-logistics entrepreneur, and who recently joined Agriculture Magazine as a columnist, about the agricultural and cultural aspects of fabric and textile, particularly piña.“[My mom] is one of the very few active textile designers in the Philippines, and I would say the only one for the Spanish colonial to premodern eras, because there are a lot of textile designers, but they're mostly tribal… tribal masters [like] the Kalingas, the Igorots, Tausugs. They are masters of their weaving craft… but nobody, except for Mom at this point, is actively creating anything other than tribal.”A lot of people tend to think of fashion as frivolous, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Fashion is an indicator, not just of culture, but of climate, tradition, and agriculture. It’s a goldmine of information on how a culture perceives itself and what it projects outwards, wounds and all.“The versatility of our culture is hamstrung by the fact that we're missing a large part of our textile visibility. Nobody's doing Spanish colonial, [partly because] we are actively denying… a large part of our history. If you look at how people are consuming Filipiñana, they always trend towards… tribal influences, even in the tattoos and all of that,” Raffy said.“They all deemed that the colonial era was bad and therefore should be forgotten or removed from our cultural psyche, but that's like telling our trauma victim to forget their trauma. You don't do that, you can't do that. We should accept that it is part of who we are and that there is a certain beauty in it as well.”Piña, Raffy theorizes, is a mix of Hindu and Spanish influences. The Spanish brought pineapples over from the Americas through the galleon trade, while the intricate skill needed to produce piña may have been derived from Indian gossamer. “I'm not saying that piña was a direct descendant of that, but maybe there was some sort of cross-pollination that managed to create the idea of, maybe we can create something out of pineapple,” Raffy said.The is very difficult to produce and work with, which is why it commands such a high price. This is where fashion collaboration comes in. “Mom's influence with Jorel, or in general, is to remove the fear that most younger designers have of touching expensive fabrics,” Raffy explained. “Like… ‘I might ruin it’ or.. ‘I'm not skilled enough.’ But you know what? If you don't try, you'll never know…. It removes barriers in several ways, from economic to mental, within the designer.”For Raffy, traditional fabrics like piña shouldn’t be thought of as a luxury but as an identity product. “This is no different from a Japanese woman coming of age and getting her first kimono. A kimono is expensive, as it should be. So why shouldn't a Filipino woman coming of age have her first baro made out of piña? That's her coming-of-age product as a Filipina. [Or] a Filipino with his first barong. Instead, when we see a person in a barong on the street, we ask them who died.”The hope is that more designers and buyers gain an interest in traditional fabrics like piña, abaca, and Philippine cotton so that more farmers are encouraged to plant the crops needed to produce the fiber for textiles, and more people are encouraged to find careers in the traditional fabric industry. The Philippine Textile Research Institute (PTRI) has many programs working towards this. That young designers like Espina are taking on the challenge is extremely heartening, not just for the Philippine fashion industry, but also for the unsung people behind it.“The ability for Jor-El to [create with piña] is one of the greatest takeaways from [the fashion show], because from there, he can create stuff based on natural fibers that we have, which will create production, which will create supply and demand. And [he can] teach the wider market within his circle… not just with the people he sells to, but the people he interacts with… That's what's important. That needs to be done. So that's why we're doing that. That's why mom's doing that.”