Back in March, when news of Jonathan Anderson’s departure from Loewe broke, among the career recaps, op-eds, and tweets of crying emojis was an Instagram post of a tarp on a rusting steel gate. “Congratulations!” it proclaimed, “Jonathan Anderson on your 11 years in Loewe! Philippines is proud of uuuu.” Behind the words was a single heirloom tomato—that heirloom tomato—and, nonsensically, a smirking Wes Anderson. The post quickly went viral. Comments were divided among the perplexed (“Girl that’s WES Anderson”) and the praising (“soo based”). It was absurdist. It was performance art. It was a new meme template.
When the image materialized on my Instagram feed, I was struck by a recognition so immediate it felt like déjà vu. I had seen that tarp before. Or rather, one like it. In the Philippines, the tarps are as ubiquitous and banal as a streetlight. Their messages, scattered across towns like an IRL spam folder, range from the justifiably momentous (weddings and first birthdays) to the charmingly mundane (acing a school test). Often, their compositions feel like Canva-induced fever dreams, with a philosophy that no amount of different fonts is ever too many. They were so bad, they were good. The design equivalent of ugly delicious.
Two years ago, on Xylk Lorena’s annual pilgrimage home, the tarps—usually background noise—suddenly seemed to be saying something. He had recently formed a Filipino streetwear brand with his friend and long-time collaborator, Fleasayo Olowalaflea, and the tarps’ blend of camp and sincerity was exactly what they wanted their new venture LiFE DESiGN to embody. “I always think about how Filipino we can be, how we can stick to our roots, and be as authentic as possible,” he tells me over Zoom alongside Fleasayo, both calling in from Toronto, where they’re based. “This seems to be one of the first ideas that is just authentically Pinoy.”
Xylk was no stranger to leveraging his Filipino-ness in his designs, often utilizing fashion as a vehicle for veiled cultural dissections. His viral Grocery Bags printed images of high-end handbags—like a Birkin or a Louis Vuitton Speedy—on Filipino sako totes made from recycled woven polypropylene. The pastiche cleverly skirted around IP copyright, a playful take on the high-low trend. (Reading between the lines, though, I couldn’t help but see it as an irreverent critique of consumer culture via a Filipino diaspora lens and how, as immigrants, we conflate luxury goods with the American dream—but that’s an essay for a different time.)
The tarps began as congratulatory missives to their favorite designers: Martine Rose, Dries Van Noten. Soon, they encompassed pop culture as a whole, anything in the zeitgeist that tickled their fancy. Kerwin Frost’s Happy Meal. Chappell Roan winning a Grammy. A$AP Rocky’s not guilty verdict. Xylk says he’s really close to congratulating the gorilla for beating a hundred men. “They’re more than banners,” says Fleasayo, who channels his years of styling and designing in New York and L.A. into his role as LiFE DESiGNER #2 (with Xylk holding the title of LiFE DESiGNER #1). “They’re love letters of recognition and success. It’s like a standing ovation.”
The banners routinely went viral, propelled by an Internet mostly charmed, sometimes confused by the dissonance between subject matter and medium. “Dries, we hung him in San Fernando, Pampanga,” recalls Xylk. “Like, who’s congratulating Dries over there? It’s the nuance and uniqueness of ‘what the fuck,’ merging the two worlds together, that makes it fun and mind boggling.” In short, the tarps are about upending expectations, the whole thing rife with class-conscious contradictions. That someone from the outskirts of Manila, where 40 percent of the city’s 23 million residents live in slums, would print a banner for Glenn Martens’ appointment at Margiela subtly reframes assumptions about who gets to enter fashion discourse’s gated community.
This game of subversion is something the pair are weaving into LiFE DESiGN’s DNA. Too often, the mainstream lifts from the ingenuity of the marginalized, repackaging beauty and humor and art borne from struggle into a pastiche void of meaning. LiFE DESiGN poses: What might that same creative expression become in the hands of someone who truly understands it?
“We want to glorify and romanticize the mundane, everyday things that are happening [in the Philippines],” says Xylk. The brand is set to release its first collection, Dressmaker, at the end of the year. In the works, but mostly still under wraps, is a collaboration with a family-run basketball jersey manufacturer on button-ups and hoodies. “What’s happening here is already good enough, it’s expensive, it’s couture,” says Xylk, “that goes deeper than actual value.” If the tarps’ success is anything to go by, perhaps we’ll be hitting the duo with a “Philippines is proud of uuuu” soon, too.