Supporting traditional textiles can fuel agriculture

Earlier this week, I was invited to an Artefino fashion show, a preview of Heir Loom, designer Jor-El Espina’s take on Filipifiana using pifia fabric from the grand dame of Filipifiana fashion Patis Tesoro’s personal collection.

- AVANT GARDENER YVETTE TAN

The show was a creative fusion of heritage and contemporary, a reintroduction of pifia 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 pifia.

“[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.