Manila FAME gives the best of design and craft a chance to shine

Manila FAME is a twice-a-year trade show for design and craft, organized by the Center for International Trade and Missions (CITEM), an agency attached to the Department of Trade and Industry.

The March staging is a somewhat smaller affair than the October show, and this year it shared the building with the Philippine International Furniture Show, which was the first time it happened. The four-day event took place at the SMX Convention Center last week.

The trade show exhibited furniture (which is usually the focus of the March event, your correspondent learned), jewelry, fashion, decorative crafts, and accessories. What makes the event interesting is that one could see glimpses into how design and the visual arts intersect.

The most obvious example would be Leeroy New, whose work has been featured in several editions of Manila FAME over the past few years. Visual artist and designer Ann Pamintuan’s own work was the subject of a retrospective volume that was launched at the Furniture Show on Saturday afternoon.

 

GMA News Online had a chance to speak with some of the designers who took part at the fair this year. For instance, Joseph Rastrullo’s furniture pieces were on display as part of the Red Box group of young designers. This was his second time at the show. For his contribution, he wanted to highlight his design philosophy and intricacies of detail. But there were touches of whimsy.

“Honestly I wanted to create interaction with my client,” he said of a wooden table whose surface could be disassembled, “so after The Lego Movie came out, I thought, okay, let’s start disassembling the table.”

His fellow Red Box designer Liliana Manahan, whose work also appeared last October, told us a bit about her background. “I think I always wanted to do something involving the arts,” she said, “and I realized later on that I was more inclined to product design than with painting, because it involved 3D work.” She often works on design projects with furniture firms, but she is starting her own brand, Studio Magee.

Another designer, Rossy Rojales, who is one-half of the couple behind design and lifestyle store Heima, displayed both recent work and a preview of the store’s new line of ceramic home decor, Shapes of Escape. “The brand is known for furniture,” she said, “but this year we wanted to experiment and try out home décor pieces, because we hadn’t really tried out ceramics.”

Traditional + modern

A friend tipped me off to one of the fashion designers at the event, mainly because of whom she was working with for her venture. Len Cabili’s Filip+Inna line arose from her fascination with the fabrics and costumes of indigenous communities.

A graduate of the clothing technology program at UP Diliman and a native of Iligan, Cabili was a member of the Bayanihan Dance Company, which she says helped expose her to the potential of using traditional motifs alongside contemporary designs. “I used to dance and I would wear traditional costume,” she said, “and in my head it would be like, oh this would look great as a skirt or [I could] wear it with jeans.”
 

After dabbling with more conventional fashion, Cabili started working on the line in 2009, and she currently collaborates with indigenous weavers in Mindanao to come up with designs. “I really work within the confines of something that’s familiar to them,” she said, “and the whole idea of Filip+Inna is for indigenous groups to work for a living using a skill that is innate to them. So it’s looking at their traditions, their weaving, and their patterns, and working around that.”

A short survey of Manila FAME would not be complete without a look at the work of a first-timer at the event. Farah Abu, who also happens to be from Iligan, trained to be an architect at UST. “A friend of mine had a baby,” she said, “and she asked me what she could do next year. I said, hmm, why don’t you try making accessories? And when she made them, I saw them and it seemed fun!”

This was in 2003. After leaving university, Abu decided not to pursue her architectural career and plunged headlong into making accessories.

Abu emphasizes that all her pieces are one-of-a-kind and customizable based on client’s needs, and for her FAME debut, she launched a new line of pieces meant for export, building on an existing network of overseas resellers who started by buying pieces themselves. Before I left the show on my first visit, though, she stopped me to add one more quote, “I like how Manila FAME has been so helpful to me. And it is very well-organized.”

Given how much buzz Manila FAME generates twice a year, it is hard to disagree. — BM, GMA News