‘Worn Stories’ at Vestido
A fashion exhibition in Manila
A floral terno tilts downward. Nearby, a figure is caught mid-step under a white dress, while another recedes into red. Each print holds its own rhythm, suspended in movement before the story continues. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
When I was invited to write the exhibition text for Worn Stories, a project by Vestido, I understood early that it would call for a different approach. Vestido, a rental company in the Philippines, is working to shift how we see clothing. Rather than cycling through garments and discarding them, they frame clothing as something to keep and return to. As part of Art Fair Philippines’ 10 Days of Art, held from 14 to 23 February 2025, the exhibition favoured stillness over display. It moved at the pace of a conversation, and invited visitors to lean in.
The exhibition text circles a column at the room’s center. It does not sit on a wall or call for attention. Instead, it shapes the space with subtle presence. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
Printed on sage green, the exhibition text offers a gentle cue to linger and read.
My task was to shape the words that would accompany each piece. The goal was to offer a framework that could carry feeling without dissolving it into explanation. Through the process, I began to see sustainability in other terms: texture, feeling, and the instinct to hold on. That perspective raised a quieter question: Do we keep clothing because we are still tethered to the moments they carry?
That question has stayed with me. Fashion is often written off as fleeting, decorative, and unserious. Yet a sleeve stretched over time or a patch faded by the sun reflects the rhythms of a life lived in a garment. Clothes absorb the gestures and repetitions of daily wear, settling into a tactile history.
A print installation laid flat across the gallery floor traces gestures, silhouettes, and materials in motion. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
A black dress stands in the center, tall and deliberate. Surrounding photographs lean in, forming a constellation of images that hum softly against the white room. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
The garments in Worn Stories seemed to speak in their own register. Writing for them meant resisting the instinct to narrate too much. It meant listening first. French essayist and philosopher Roland Barthes famously described fashion as a language—a system of signs through which identity, history, and sentiment are expressed¹.
Each piece became a letter unknowingly written by the wearer, delivered through a shared reverence for a beautiful garment: a knot tied just so, a carefully patched hem, the subtle repair of a torn strap.
Writing became an act of translation. The clothing already held its stories; the role of the text was to make them legible. In fashion contexts, there is often a temptation to frame garments as flawless or aspirational. In this environment, the appeal lay in their ordinariness, in their raw edges and softened fibers. Their imperfection carried an intimacy that perfection could not replicate.
As German Philosopher Walter Benjamin once suggested, objects can harbour an aura: a lingering trace of the lives they have touched². He described aura as something that clings to an object through time, experience, and use. That presence was felt throughout the collection on view, in every fold, crease, and gesture. A sense of lived history could be felt in the way a sleeve hung, in the gentle collapse of fabric, and in the energy that drifted throughout the room.
Some garments revealed this more vividly than others. A shapeless dress, with its capacity to mould to the body and fray at the margins became a second skin. It was a silent witness to transformation and daily rituals. Cotton, softened by repetition, bore the texture of days passed. Even mending, though hidden in view, revealed something more tender: a re-commitment to an object filled with meaning.
Photographs collect along a canvas, loosely sequenced. A visitor appears just beyond the frame. Nothing is arranged too tightly—each piece leaves space for memory to drift. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
A single figure turns in multiplied motion, her skirt catching light in each turn. Across the wall, a still portrait draws the eye inward. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
This recalls what scholars of material culture call a biography of objects³. Clothing moves through a life much like a person does. Threads thinning at the elbows. Fabric weathered to softness where a hand often rested. These small marks carry more weight than any newness ever could.
Within Manila’s fashion landscape, where exhibitions tend to center retail or runway, Vestido’s presentation offered a slower, more contemplative form of engagement. It encouraged viewers to pause and see fashion as a personal archive.
The city has long understood clothing as a carrier of meaning. The barong tagalog, an embroidered formal shirt for men, and the terno, the illustrious dress with butterfly sleeves, are embedded with national symbolism.
The barong, once used as a discreet form of resistance during colonial rule, continues today as an emblem of identity and pride. When a modern-day bride wears a reimagined terno or a groom dons his grandfather’s barong, they participate in a layered form of remembrance.
Beyond heritage wear, Manila’s independent fashion scene, shaped in part by the ukay-ukay or thrift culture, embraces garments as artifacts of personal expression. Digging through mountains of second-hand clothing, Filipinos often search for pieces that feel singular: a jacket with the right wear and tear, a dress patterned with decades-old motifs, or even a washed-out band tee that feels like a relic from a different era. In this way, even the act of dressing becomes archival, piecing together a wardrobe like a treasure trove of borrowed memories, merging past lives to create a completely new experience.
Inside the gallery, a long print sheet pulls visitors toward the work. Conversations form alongside it. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
Recent exhibitions have echoed this approach. Retrospectives like Timeless: J. Moreno and A Life of Fashion and Fashion for Life gathered decades of design into quiet rooms. They observed how clothing reflects shifting ideals, movements, and eras. In galleries like Hibla ng Lahing Filipino or Ayala Museum’s Art and the Order of Nature, garments are presented for their structure and logic rather than their decorative appeal. It is a way to understand how materials move through time and place. Similarly, more recent offerings such as Filipiniana x Obra demonstrate how contemporary designers, drawing from art and architecture, are reimagining national dress. Across these varied settings, the framing changes. Fashion is approached through the lens of context and care: what gets preserved, what gets reworked, and what we choose to pay attention to.
Preservation, in this context, becomes a form of sustainable thinking. As the fashion industry reckons with its environmental toll, movements like slow fashion, first defined by Kate Fletcher in her 2007 article in The Ecologist⁴, advocate for a shift from disposability to emotional durability. The Fashion Revolution campaign, a global movement supporting a more ethical and sustainable fashion industry, reminds us that "loved clothes last." It reflects a shift toward living with intention and dressing with meaning in mind.
A visitor holds the exhibition zine—a compact document of the show’s ideas and images. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
In the Philippines, that instinct often comes from something more deeply rooted than trend resistance. There is a word, panghihinayang, that describes the regret felt when something is wasted or let go too soon. It is about frugality as much as it is about emotions. It is why garments are patched, restyled, or kept away in drawers long past their daily use. From a young age, we learn the feeling of panghihinayang as an emotional reflex, tied to the pull of garments that feel familiar. Letting go can feel like erasing a version of ourselves or the trace of someone else’s life.
When we cling to a jacket that saw us through a difficult year, or a dress that reminds us of a special occasion, we are practising sustainability in its most personal form: by refusing to discard memory.
This became especially apparent to me while working on the text itself. I returned to my own clothing with new eyes. I thought about the coat I wore when I first moved to London for university, its elbows tattered from leaning on unfamiliar desks. The pair of boots that saw me through lengthy treks and harder seasons. The rugby jersey I wore to my first tournament, stretched and softened by time, that still feels like a second home.
Like many, I used to think of clothes as merely expression. Signals of identity, defiance, belonging. But Worn Stories revealed another layer: preservation. Clothing is a living archive, holding both the landmarks and the overlooked details of a life. The pieces we keep, and the ones we reach for without thinking, are often the ones most saturated with meaning.
A closer look at the zine layout, featuring selected images and artist details. Photo by Gab Villareal. Image courtesy of Vestido.
Ultimately, this curatorial initiative reminded me that the most powerful narratives are often silent. Fashion, when freed from cycles of trend and seasons, becomes a medium for memory—tactile, intimate, enduring.
The garments in the photographs were not artifacts to admire from afar; they were companions, bearing the imprint of lives lived fully and imperfectly. Through this reflection on dress, we were invited to see fashion not as a showcase but as evidence of resilience, transformation, and the stories we continue to carry long after the fabric itself has faded. Because clothing that is lived-in, mended, and cherished always remembers.
Notes
Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).
Ivan Kopytoff, The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process, in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Kate Fletcher, “Slow Fashion,” The Ecologist, June 1, 2007, https://theecologist.org/2007/jun/01/slow-fashion.
About the writer
Karina Swee is a Manila-based writer and curator focused on fashion, visual culture, and sustainability. Her work draws from editorial research and exhibition-making, exploring how garments and images reflect shifting values, slow design practices, and evolving forms of cultural production.