To close day one MNL Fashion Week 2026, JAG and young designers Yana Kalaw, Kill Joy Studios, and Lilah Roché presented collections that defied clothing stereotypes and challenged convention.

PHOTOGRAPHY No Name PH and Akira Watanabe
What does it mean to innovate? In fashion, it is often said that creating something entirely new is nearly impossible. Everything is borrowed, reinterpreted, or derived from an idea that has come before. With the sheer oversaturation of references and aesthetics, perhaps newness itself has become a difficult thing to define. But for JAG and the young Filipino designers who closed MNL Fashion Week Day One, that hardly seemed to matter.
The evening ended with collections that found new possibilities in the familiar. Denim was reconstructed into sculptural forms; fringe became a tool for texture and movement; utilitarian details were exaggerated into design statements; and Filipino references were transformed into something distinctly contemporary. Across four very different collections, convention was never the rule.
<h3>JAG: 50 Years of Denim, Made New</h3>

JAG is undeniably a denim institution. After five decades, the local label has become synonymous with the everyday Filipino wardrobe, but its MNL Fashion Week presentation was a reminder that familiarity does not have to mean predictability. For its 50th anniversary, JAG looked at denim as a material with room to evolve.
The collection played with denim’s inherent rigidity by giving it unexpected softness, volume, and movement. Sculpted bralettes were constructed from patchworked panels, while shirred and gathered denim coats took on the plush proportions of faux fur. Elsewhere, exaggerated silhouettes, sculptural jeans, and intricate detailing pushed the humble blue jean beyond its most recognizable form.
The result was denim with a decidedly more experimental vocabulary — less about the traditional five-pocket jean and more about what else the fabric could become.
At the center of the presentation was a reveal that signaled the label’s next chapter. Nadine Lustre made a surprise appearance as JAG’s newest ambassador, walking the runway in a striking paneled denim bralette paired with baggy jeans and an attached capelet that moved dramatically with every step. Her appearance felt fitting: a distinctly contemporary face for a brand looking toward what's next.

After five decades, JAG is still asking the same question in a different way: what else can denim do?
<h3>Yana Kalaw: Girlhood, Reclaimed</h3>

What is femininity, anyway?
For Yana Kalaw, that question became the starting point for Girls, Girls, Girls, a prologue to Queen Notes Chapter 1 and a deeply personal exploration of gender, sexuality, and the expectations placed on women. Drawing from her experience growing up in an all-girls Catholic school, Kalaw questions why femininity can so often feel like something that needs to be performed, proven, or even restrained.
“Why does femininity have to be proven?” she asks. “It’s something about reclaiming femininity.”

The sentiment translated into a collection that was deliberately excessive, unabashedly feminine, and unapologetically queer. Michelle Marquez Dee opened the presentation in a sheer tulle dress emblazoned with the word “tibo,” immediately setting the tone for a collection that refused to soften its point of view. Gothic sheers, exaggerated volumes, and furry textures followed, with styling that veered into the theatrical.
There was a camp sensibility to it all, informed by the Rococo period, pop culture, and the queer canon of her youth. Kalaw cites films like Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Saved!, and But I’m a Cheerleader as references, the latter becoming particularly significant to her color story.&nbsp;The most memorable looks leaned fully into this maximalism: ornate military-inspired hats, outrageous fur heels, baroque detailing, and a provocative vagina-flower pin that transformed femininity from something delicate into something defiant.
For Kalaw, however, the spectacle is deeply personal. Growing up in an environment where sexuality was not always easy to discuss, fashion became a way of processing the restrictions she experienced—and ultimately letting them go.
“My designs now, it’s a way for me to completely grieve for everything and let go and just release everything,” she tells L'Officiel Philippines. In that sense,&nbsp;Girls, Girls, Girls is less a celebration of femininity as a prescribed ideal and more an act of reclaiming it on her own terms.
<h3 class="isSelectedEnd">Kill Joy Studios: Youth in the Streets</h3>

If Kalaw looked inward, Eugene Malabab of Kill Joy Studios looked outward — to the streets that raised him.
Titled KALYE TREZ MIXTAPE, the collection takes its name from “Kalye Trez,” the nickname for Third Street in Villamor, Pasay City, where Malabab grew up and continues to live. The collection is, in many ways, a fashion archive of that place: its people, its sounds, its heat, its public transportation, and the visual language of Manila streets.
“So, when I was a kid, that was the term we used to refer to our street because everyone knew each other there,” Malabab tells L’Officiel Philippines. “It’s where I grew up, so why not commemorate all the years I spent at that Kalye Trez?”
That sense of community is translated through a distinctly streetwear vocabulary. Functional details — pockets, buttons, straps, hardware, and gear-like construction — give the clothes a utilitarian foundation, but Malabab disrupts that practicality with unexpected proportions, structural details, bold color, and generous fringe.

The collection is also an amalgamation of the designer’s cultural references. Coming-of-age films, techno, queer friendships, sex, the Philippine heat, and the general energy of growing up in Manila all find their way into the mix.
Even the silhouettes carry traces of the city. Malabab has long collected photographs of jeepneys, whose distinctive shapes have informed his work since his earlier collection Rotonda. Curved edges, rectangular forms, and graphic lines reappear throughout KALYE TREZ MIXTAPE, while public utility vehicles become another visual reference.
It is this collision of the functional and the flamboyant that makes Kill Joy Studios compelling. The clothes feel as though they belong to the street, but they have been pushed, exaggerated, and reconstructed until they become something much more expressive.&nbsp;A mixtape, after all, is never just one sound. It is a collection of memories that only make sense when played together.
<h3 class="isSelectedEnd">Lilah Roché: Sampaguita Rising</h3>

For Lilah Roché, Filipino identity arrived through scent, symbolism, and a heroine of her own making.
Titled The Sampaguita Queenpin, the collection by designer Jayanne Santos of Lilah Roché reimagines the heiress of a Manila noir action universe, drawing from the sampaguita — the Philippines’ national flower — and filtering its delicate symbolism through a darker, more cinematic lens.
The presentation began with the unmistakable scent of sampaguita filling the runway, turning the show into a multisensory experience before the clothes even appeared. From there, Santos built a world where Filipina femininity, church culture, bridal codes, and the mythology of the Filipino heroine collided.
At the heart of the collection is a woman whose power is entirely her own. “In a way, what I'm trying to show is female empowerment,” Santos says. “Though the theme is kind of dark, in my head, when I was trying to create a story, she became a queenpin not because of a guy. She became a queenpin because of how smart she is.”
<h3>An Exploration of the Unexpected</h3>
Across JAG, Yana Kalaw, Kill Joy Studios, and Lilah Roché, the familiar was repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt into something unexpected. Denim became sculpture. Femininity became reclamation. The street became an archive. The sampaguita became a muse.
If fashion cannot create from nothing, perhaps innovation was never really about creating something entirely new. Perhaps it is about looking at what we already know and having the audacity to see it differently.

JAG and NextGen Young Designers Break Convention at MNL Fashion Week 2026

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