Alembong: Reclaiming Filipino Feminine Energy in Fashion

Jerome Allen Lorico has a gift for turning a word on its head. This is one of those moments when a designer takes a word we thought we knew and flips it, reframing it into the joyful essence that was lost. That word is Alembong. Playful, piquant, often maligned, but in his hands, a mirror to the Filipina spirit that is both mischievous and magnificent.

As one of 12 FASHIONPhilippines designers at Milan Fashion Week, Jerome brings a 15-piece collection and a meditation on how language, material, and memory can be stitched into something at once subversive and soulful to Fondazione Sozzani.

This showcase is part of the FASHIONPhilippines Milan Mentorship Program. A project by Department of Trade and Industry – Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions (CITEM) collaboration with the Philippine Fashion Coalition, DOST PTRI, and Lit.fashion Consultancy, created to elevate Filipino talent on the international stage.

The story doesn’t end in Milan: these collections will return home to Manila FAME 2025 at the World Trade Center Philippines this October, a reminder that what we present to the world must also enrich our own ground.
Design For Tomorrow was asked to write the curator’s notes for Alembong, and lay out the collection’s accompanying literature. It was a privilege and a provocation to help frame Jerome’s vision at this milestone moment for Philippine design.

Alembong

Alembong. A word that, in its modern aftertaste, carries the sly curl of a lip: flirt, coquette, frivolous. Historically and anthropologically, before the weight of colonization and the catechism of virtue, it was something else: a shimmer in the air, the sparkle of a young Filipina’s wit, the quicksilver daring of laughter that refuses to bow. Alembong was ebullience itself, a feminine street-smartness that brightened the barangay.

The Spaniards, with their saints and sermons, found this sparkle too ungovernable. Under the gaze of Catholic morality, alembong was demoted to vice, its playful energy pressed into silence. Yet listen closely to the folk songs: Sitsiritsit with its teasing cadences, Paru-parong Bukid winging through fields, the lilting grace of Cariñosa, the unruly laughter of Waray-Waray, and the spirit persists. Each melody is a secret insurgency, an echo of alembong’s original freedom.

Jerome Lorico seizes this paradox. His Alembong Collection does not trade in coyness, but in reclamation. The garments, spun from piña, silk, cotton, and hybrid fibres, drape and unravel like wind skimming skin, never erotic for its own sake, but alive with ease, fire, and awakening. Like the tapis of old, they suggest both modesty and abandon, discipline and spontaneity.

In Milan, Alembong arrives not as nostalgia but as provocation: the lost feminine energy restored, the barrio lass and the city girl merged, water and fire in one body. What the Church once sought to tame, fashion here sets free.

Ric Gindap is the creative and strategy director of Design For Tomorrow, a top branding, strategy, and design agency based in Manila, Philippines. DFT is also registered in Singapore and collaborates with clients from Manila to Melbourne and Munich. Diverse projects have been completed from Bangkok to Berlin, and he has recently completed brand programs in Tokyo, Vienna, and Copenhagen.

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