Mich Dulce’s Nagsasalitang Ulo at Finale Art File
Western millinery reframed through Filipino identity and history
Installation view of the hats at Finale Art File Manila. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Mich Dulce.
Over the years, Filipino fashion designer and artist Mich Dulce has moved through the structures of European craft traditions. Trained under the Queen’s milliner, she was formerly a designer for Maison Michel Paris, and she is now an industry mentor for The Chanel and The King’s Foundation Métiers d’Art Millinery Fellowship. She brings that lineage to Finale Art File this September with Nagsasalitang Ulo (Talking Heads), her first millinery show in fifteen years. But this time, she turns those codes back toward Filipino cultural memory and identity.
Mich Dulce. Portrait by Gab Villareal.
“Where do I fit in all this?” she asked more than once during our virtual conversations. Having worked with Mich on the exhibition text, I saw how often she circled back to this question, trying to prise open something that many Filipino and Southeast Asian artists contend with when moving through spaces shaped by Western traditions. That questioning is ever-present in her work: earlier exhibitions drew on personal memory and feminist activism, exploring how the self might be located within wider cultural and political structures.
Scenes from the show opening at Finale Art File in Makati. Photo by Gab Villareal. Images courtesy of Mich Dulce.
In Nagsasalitang Ulo, the same impulse confronts the legacies of craft. “I realised while being immersed in the British millinery scene that the things considered classics, like the boater or the fedora or the cowboy hat, are all Western,” she says. “There is not really a classic that we think of as Asian.” This show, she explains, became a way to clarify what her work was about. She elaborates, “I really wanted to talk about identity and clarify the identity behind my work, and really realise what my place is within the industry, and how I can ensure that my culture is represented within that.”
Installation view of the hats for Nagsasalitang Ulo at Finale Art File in Makati. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Mich Dulce.
“I realised while being immersed in the British millinery scene that the things considered classics, like the boater or the fedora or the cowboy hat, are all Western. There is not really a classic that we think of as Asian.”
Designer and artist Mich Dulce with Vogue Philippines fashion director Pam Quinones and cultural critic and independent curator Marian Pastor Roces. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Mich Dulce.
Cultural critic and independent curator Marian Pastor Roces has written of the head in the Philippines as the site of “animated culture-making,” a text that became central to Dulce’s research for the show. Looking at the SOAS archive’s Mapping Philippine Material Culture project, where Roces contributed an essay, she recalled noting how certain details resonated, such as red being the colour of power, and gold being a symbol of wealth.
Mich in her actual studio: development stages of the works for Nagsasalitang Ulo. Early paper mock-ups and hand-shaped woven forms show how she experiments with scale, structure, and material before finalising each piece. Images courtesy of Mich Dulce.
Over the course of a year, she gathered images and words without editing them. She says, “It is kind of dumping and dumping imagery, and then making sense of that later on, and also reading a lot and connecting with words.” The works in Nagsasalitang Ulo come from this attentive process of accumulation, selection, and refinement, which is apparent, too, in the show’s exhibition design.
The workshop table in the gallery covered in sketches, paper studies, and fragments of material experiments, capturing the moment where Mich’s concepts first take physical shape. Photos by Gab Villareal. Images courtesy of Mich Dulce.
At the show’s entrance, Mich stages her working table. Wooden hat blocks of varying sizes sit alongside spools of thread, coils of wire, rolls of buntal fibre, and sheets of black crinoline. Scattered sketches and photocopied images point to her sources, from historic headwear to Philippine landscapes, while cut ribbons, scissors, and shaping tools are strewn across the table.“After accumulating all these images, I rearranged them and manipulated them,” she explained. “I would redraw them again and again to see which forms resonated with me.”
Mich described this stage of experimentation as one of constant testing. She says, “After that came material testing, deciding what materials to use, making sure the piece was light enough to sit on the head but strong enough to hold its shape.” The same discernment guided her decisions about which works would eventually be shown. “It is really a whole process,” she explains, “from research to sketching to three-dimensional play, and then I edit. Not all ideas make it to the show. Only the best and most consistent ones do.”
A selection of headpieces from Nagsasalitang Ulo, showcasing a range of sculptural approaches. Photos by Gab Villareal. Images courtesy of Mich Dulce.
Beyond the table, a sequence of sculptural hats is displayed across plinths and stands—a chorus of “talking heads” carrying the marks of local traditions, landscapes, and histories. A salakot, the familiar wide-brimmed hat worn across the Philippines for protection against sun and rain, is transformed into scarlet grosgrain ribbons that flare upward. The Ifugao rice terraces, carved into the mountains of northern Luzon more than 2,000 years ago, reappear as a tiered green crown. A bahay kubo, the lightweight bamboo and palm stilt house of the Philippine lowlands, is reimagined in buntal and crinoline, its lattice recalling a Victorian petticoat.
A selection of headpieces from Nagsasalitang Ulo, showcasing a range of sculptural approaches. Photos by Gab Villareal. Images courtesy of Mich Dulce.
Other works draw on the Ivatan vakul, a vuyavuy palm-fibre headpiece from Batanes made to withstand both sun and rain, which Dulce re-skins in ostrich feather, while the Ilocano tabungaw, a gourd hat once used by farmers and even revolutionaries, appears in latex and buckram. Fragments of Philippine history and culture are spliced together with couture technique, twisting them into objects that are both recognisable and estranged, and in the process become something altogether new. As Mich puts it, “I felt it was not enough to only use different materials. It was also important to contribute to the shapes and direction of what hat-making is.” In Nagsasalitang Ulo, that conviction takes form.