Koalakooch’s Harvest Girl 26–27 turns fragments of femininity, digital nostalgia, and personal memory into a world that is both intimate and unapologetically strange.

PHOTOGRAPHY &amp; CREATIVE DIRECTION Maro Tejada

Rooted in the visual codes of 90s grunge and heroin-chic imagery, the world of Koalakooch, according to founder Maro Tejada, exists somewhere between nostalgia and reinvention. For its first collection, Harvest Girl 26–27, the label draws from the polished fashion campaigns of the 2000s and 2010s, the immediacy of early digital culture, and the contradictions of femininity itself. Shot through a deliberately lo-fi lens, including phone images that recall the intimacy and imperfection of social media’s earliest days, the campaign feels both familiar and slightly displaced—as if a memory from another era has been reassembled in the present. At the center of it all is the Harvest Girl: vulnerable yet self-possessed, shaped by all she has experienced, absorbed, rejected, and carried with her.
L’Officiel Philippines speaks to Tejada about the origins of this alter ego, the making of Koalakooch’s debut collection, the women and visual culture that shaped its perspective, and the evolving practice behind the clothes.

Let’s talk about Koalakooch’s first collection. What were your inspirations for it? 
Harvest Girl 26–27 is a collection shaped by a variety of influences, but at its center is a girl harvesting experiences of vulnerability. I think of her as someone constantly becoming—through desire, discomfort, memory, contradiction, aspiration, and the things she absorbs from the world around her.
A lot of the collection came from the feeling of being shaped by things you do not always consciously choose. Some of the references are personal, some are cultural, historical, digital, even superficial, but once they pass through you, they become part of how you see yourself. Harvest Girl carries those things with her. She keeps what speaks to her, rejects what does not, and sometimes lives with the contradiction of wanting both.
That is also tied to how Koalakooch began for me: as an alter ego during a darker period of my life, almost to step outside of myself. Over time, that escape became a way of looking back at myself more clearly. So, with Harvest Girl, I wanted the collection to feel like someone learning how to inhabit herself for the first time.
The collection pulls from different ideas of femininity: old and new, familiar and imported, polished and unfinished. I did not want to force all of those references into one clean narrative. I was more interested in how they could coexist on one body. For me, Harvest Girl is less about a fixed character and more about a person actively becoming. She is not fully resolved, and I think that’s the point.
What piqued your fascination with the silhouettes, textures, and fabrics you’ve used in this collection?
I’ve always been drawn to delicate fabrics—materials that move, flow, fall close to the body, or reveal something through their lightness. One of my earliest ideas for Koalakooch was the feeling of “wearing her skin.” I was interested in clothing that could still acknowledge the naked body underneath it as a way of expressing vulnerability.
That's why I gravitated toward materials like lyocell, mulberry silk, lace, ostrich feathers, and fur. They all respond differently to the body. Some feel soft and fluid, some are sheer, some create movement, and some feel almost animalistic or tactile. I also kept returning to blonde fur and hair-like textures because they made the pieces feel more alive and slightly strange, like a body.
While making the collection, there was honestly a point where it felt like we were butchering and harvesting something: taking textures, references, and fragments, cutting them apart, and making something new from them. That’s where the title Harvest Girl came from. She is built from what has been gathered, stripped down, and reassembled.
I think that also connects to my fascination with women and femininity. Growing up around Filipina women—my sisters, cousins, lolas, and the women in my family—femininity never felt like one fixed image to me. I saw softness alongside strength, modesty alongside sensuality, care alongside vulgarity, restraint alongside a desire to be seen. They were not afraid to express themselves through the body, through humor, glamour, sexuality, or even contradiction. I think observing that complexity stayed with me.
Silhouette became another way to explore it. I was especially drawn to the visual language of the pañuelo and the Gibson Girl. What interested me was the tension between a garment associated with covering and framing the body, and a silhouette that deliberately emphasized the feminine curve. I wanted to translate that contradiction into Koalakooch by exaggerating the feminine body even while dressing it in something that suggests modesty or restraint. It became less about reproducing either reference literally and more about honoring an evolution of femininity that I had already witnessed in real life, in the women around me. That is where the exaggerated shoulders, soft volume, fitted curves, raw edges, and uneven details drew from. So, the collection moves between concealment and exposure, softness and structure, delicacy and excess. For me, those contradictions feel very close to what Koalakooch is.

What was the most fascinating part of this collection’s creation process?
Piecing together who Harvest Girl was through the materials. I enjoyed sourcing locally as much as I could, especially because it made the process feel more personal and grounded. Still, I was also open to imported materials when I needed a very specific texture or finish to match the image I had in mind.
A lot of the collection came together through that act of curation: finding the right silk, lyocell, lace, fur, hair, metal, feather, or trim, then asking what each material could add to the character. It felt less like starting with a perfectly fixed design and more like building it piece by piece.
The campaign shoot draws from 90s grunge and heroin-chic fashion imagery, filtered through the visual language of 2010s campaigns and digital culture. The images balance polished fashion references with a more raw, immediate quality. Phone shots were used deliberately to mimic the lo-fi digital era.
Could you tell us more about your brand and how it’s evolved since its birth? What are your dreams for it?
Well, Koalakooch didn’t begin as a brand. It began as an alter ego and, for a while, existed mostly as an Instagram dump account. I used it almost like a visual diary, posting moodboards and images that felt satirical, eerie, glamorous, or slightly unsettling. A recurring image of a blonde woman I had found on Pinterest became, over time, a kind of stand-in for Koalakooch herself.
At that stage, I was not formally thinking about fashion yet. I was just collecting images and building a world around a persona without really knowing where it would lead. Looking back, that was probably the beginning of Koalakooch’s visual language.&nbsp;
Eventually, the persona became less about escaping into another character and more about understanding what that character was carrying from me. That shift is what pushed Koalakooch toward clothing. Fashion gave the image a body.
Now, I see Koalakooch as a fashion label, but also as something broader. I want it to remain a space where garments, images, objects, and characters can exist together and keep changing over time. My dream is for it to grow without becoming too polished or fixed. I want Koalakooch to become more established and ambitious, but still feel personal, strange, and open enough to evolve with me.

I’m interested in what people become when they are forced&nbsp;to adapt, and what parts of themselves they choose to carry forward afterward.

How has your perspective shifted or remained since your last design endeavor? 
I think my design perspective has become less concerned with making everything feel immediately resolved. In earlier work, I was more conscious of whether an idea looked polished, complete, or easy to understand. With Koalakooch, I became more comfortable with leaving things strange, unfinished, or contradictory.
What has remained is my interest in building a world around an idea. My background is in architecture, after all. I still think about image, atmosphere, proportion, material, and narrative together. The difference now is that I trust instinct more. I do not feel the same need to explain every decision or make every reference obvious.
I think that shift also comes from working across different disciplines. Architecture taught me structure, but image- making taught me that something can still be strong even when it is ambiguous. With Koalakooch, I started allowing softness, awkwardness, exaggeration, and imperfection to coexist.
So, I would say the core of my design perspective has remained the same in that I still care deeply about form, storytelling, and visual language, but I am less interested now in controlling the outcome. I want the work to leave room for interpretation.
Koalakooch’s proudest moment so far?
It would have to be presenting Koalakooch at the most recent&nbsp;PURVEYR Fair in September 2026. It was the first time the brand felt fully outside of my own head and workspace. For a long time, Koalakooch existed as a private visual world—images, references, digital personas, and ideas I was still trying to understand myself. Seeing the collection displayed, worn, and experienced by other people made it feel real in a completely different way.
What meant the most was seeing people respond to the pieces without needing everything explained to them first. That was probably the moment I realized Koalakooch could live beyond me while still keeping the intimacy it started with. That experience made the project feel less like something I was privately building and more like something that could genuinely grow into a label.
What are your long-term influences? What are the things that have inspired you for years?
A lot of my long-term influences come from the women I grew up around. I was raised in a women-dominated household, and that shaped how I understood femininity very early on. I saw women as mothers, providers, caretakers, survivors, and also as people with their own contradictions, desires, frustrations, and ambitions. I watched how they moved through difficult situations, how they made things work, and how strength and vulnerability could exist at the same time. That has stayed with me.
My sisters, Kate and Keyn, also shaped my taste in a very specific way during my adolescent years. Through them, I became fascinated with dance, Los Angeles, celebrity culture, Hollywood, and the fashion world that surrounded it. We watched ETC constantly, and that was where I first encountered shows like America’s Next Top Model, The Rachel Zoe Project, Project Runway, the early seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and even shows like New Girl. That whole visual culture—the styling, transformation, personalities, glamour, backstage tension, and the idea of constructing an image became part of how I understood fashion before I even knew I wanted to work with it. I’m interested in honoring what those years actually felt like from the inside, rather than revisiting them only through nostalgia.
Another constant influence for me is vulnerability itself. I often return to shame, darkness, survival, and rebirth, not because I want the work to feel heavy all the time, but because those are the moments when identity becomes most visible to me. I’m interested in what people become when they are forced to adapt, and what parts of themselves they choose to carry forward afterward.

What are your current influences? What’s inspiring you right now? 
Right now, I’m very drawn to the visual language of 2010s fashion campaigns. Versace, Alexander McQueen, Jeremy Scott, Jeffrey Campbell, Kate Moss-era imagery...that kind of highly styled femininity that felt very specific to that period.
I’m particularly interested in the span between 2013 to 2017, when so much of my taste was being shaped online and through pop culture. Tumblr, early Twitter, fashion blogs, fan edits, music videos, and celebrity culture all influenced the way I learned to look at images. I remember that period feeling very chaotic and performative—the VMAs, Miley Cyrus, celebrity reinventions, spectacle, and the sense that everyone was constantly becoming a new version of themselves in public.
Music from that period is also a big influence for me. I keep returning to techno, scene culture, and songs that deal with shame, desire, excess, or self-destruction. Music videos especially stay with me because they sit somewhere between fashion, performance, character, and image-making.
I also keep returning to films centered on complicated women. Easy A was one of the first films I remember watching in high school that made me consciously recognize that kind of complexity. From then on, I think I started seeking out characters like that almost subconsciously—women who were messy, funny, vulnerable, judged, difficult to reduce to just one thing. Looking back, I think I was searching for characters I could deeply relate to before I even had the language to explain why.
I’m drawn to these references because femininity has never felt singular to me. It can be glamorous, embarrassing, aggressive, soft, unstable, and vulnerable all at once. A lot of what inspires me now is returning to the visual culture I absorbed when I was younger, but with the freedom and tools to reinterpret it as an adult and make something of my own from it.
Your design philosophy in one sentence?
What we carry becomes what we make.

HAIR &amp; MAKEUP Eugene Malabad
MODEL Marinelle Beltran
SHOOT ASSISTANT Rechell Ann De Guzman

Alter Ego: Koalakooch

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