Whenever I leave a certain phase in my life, I try to leave behind a legacy. Back in high school, I designed five T-shirts that we sold for a cause, and one eventually spread like wildfire, not just in the Lasallian community in the Philippines but also in other schools, as well. Now, as I leave my college life, I have told myself that I wouldn’t just leave a legacy in school, but a legacy in the fashion industry and our society.

Street style has been revolutionizing our world since the 1940s. According to anthropologist Sophie Woodward, street style is defined as an idea, phrase, practice or image that can be located in numerous sites. It is also the product of people mixing and matching, restyling, customizing and modifying their clothing to match their individual sense of style, lifestyle, personality and association.

Scott Schuman describes it as the youth’s nonverbal aesthetic expression of themselves. The rebellious energy has become the heart of street style.

The documenting of street style was taking place as early as the ’60s, with Bill Cunningham as the first street style photographer. Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta called Cunningham’s photographs a visual history of the last 50 years of New York. Street style proved to be highly significant in anthropology as well as in the fashion industry, with both fields investing in research on how everyone dressed up on a daily basis. Hence, the idea of Kalsada was born.

Stories

What started out as my thesis grew into this big project of celebrating and documenting Philippine street style, as I am traveling to 26 key cities in different parts of the country and

shooting more than 500 Filipinos of different backgrounds, to tell their stories through their styles for the year 2013. Kalsada will be an online platform and book that will showcase all of these to empower the synergy of the youth and fashion industry in cultivating street style. I want this to be a visual history of Philippine fashion throughout the year 2013.

As of this writing, I have completed my travels in Visayas and Mindanao, and it has been such an amazing experience, meeting new people, listening to stories about the fashion and culture of each city and more. It’s heartwarming to see how people from these different cities have appreciated and interacted with each other through Kalsada, as it’s one of my goals for this project. I could see Baguio liking Bacolod, and Bacolod asking Davao where she got her dress. It is this interaction that contributes to the synergy that I’m talking about. The community that I am building online is getting bigger, and as I continue my journey, I hope you, too, will be part of this project.

To find out more about Kalsada, you may check out the official Facebook page at https://facebook.com/KalsadaPH.