Joey Samson celebrates X years in fashion by exploring the anatomy of the suit

 

Ten years in the fashion business have earned designer Joey Samson the kind of devoted clientele that would happily cram themselves into a serviced apartment building's narrow corridors and small rooms to catch a glimpse of his new collection.

In those ten years, Samson also amassed an admiring fanbase of fellow artists who paid tribute to him by creating videos that refer and loop back to his work, videos which were shown at "Joey Samson X," a part-exhibit, part-fashion show event last Friday that celebrated Samson's decade in the business and his talent for creation.

It took place at the Picasso Boutique Serviced Residences in Makati, where every floor from the third level up had one room displaying Samson's designs, hanging on the walls or strewn on the bed as if they were about to be put on by the room's unseen occupant.

Projected on the walls of the rooms were the videos, different for each room but all showing disparate, unexplained scenes—in one, a fashionably dressed woman is lamenting some unknown misery, while in another a girl is endlessly jumping up and down in glee. Art, I'm sure.

The event was a test to see if you were enough of a fan of the designer's work to trudge up and down the stairwell to check out all the rooms with displays in them. The main event, the fashion show, was also partly an experiment to see how many sweaty, expensively-dressed scenesters you could fit into the building's cramped, split-level gym on the fifth and sixth floors (the vague answer: several dozen).

Since there was no runway, the models would slip into the room and take up their positions among the gym equipment, standing stock still among the ellipticals and the rowing machines for several minutes before walking into the crowd and then back out again. For almost every look, Samson used the most conventional materials—suit fabrics—then turned convention on its head by creating outfits that would only be commonplace in a boardroom if that boardroom were in a glossy fashion spread.

There were 22 looks in all, including tops that looked like unfinished, inside-out jackets with the seams showing. One model's blazer looked like it had been put on backwards. Another model's frock looked like it was made from a travel suit bag. One male model wore voluminous shorts over his pants.

The entire event was a well-made wackiness that showcased Samson's humor as well as his tailoring skills: it's one thing to make well-tailored suits from conventional fabrics, quite another to make well-tailored bizarro versions of suits from conventional fabrics and actually create looks that make some odd kind of fashion sense.

"I wanted to explore what I call the anatomy of a suit," Samson told GMA News Online after the event. And while these are not the most out-there creations he's done—"I think it's also important to find a happy compromise, a balance between what I like and what my clients can relate to"
—Samson wants to show the hard work that goes into fashion by turning it inside-out. Literally.

"I want to teach the crowd and my clientele about fashion instead of simply showing what's 'uso,'" he said. "And since I'm good at making suits, this is how I decided to do it. It makes more people aware that this is what I do best."