Don’t post it, you’ll go viral!”

That was Rosmah Mansor’s lighthearted warning to Randy Ortiz when the fashion designer asked for a photo with the wife of then Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

This was last November, when Rosmah paid Ortiz a visit in his Makati atelier to order clothes and fabrics. Earlier that week, the Malaysian first lady had watched a presentation of Ortiz’s modern Filipiniana collection at Manila Hotel for the spouses of world leaders attending the 31st Asean Summit here.

Rosmah was apparently quite impressed with Ortiz’s work, such that she sought the help of the show’s organizers to get an appointment with the designer.

“I had no idea why she said that during our photo op. I had to call (fashion show director) Jackie (Aquino) to find out who she was,” a bemused Ortiz said when Lifestyle called him up last Thursday for this interview. “I didn’t know of her.”

Major partner

Najib, who ruled Malaysia for almost a decade, lost in the May 9 Malaysian elections. He and his wife are accused of having laundered billions of dollars in public funds. A New York Times article (May 15, 2018) described Rosmah as her husband’s “major partner in the corruption and scandals,” who took “chartered shopping expeditions to Europe and Australia.”

Rosmah, according to Ortiz, ordered dozens of his fabrics with custom embroidery, and he provided her with patterns and designs for the clothes to be made back in Malaysia.

“She was gracious, decent and funny,” Ortiz said. “She said she knew that my clothes from the Asean show wouldn’t suit her, so she asked for more appropriate designs.”

On that visit, the designer said Rosmah had come from luxury department store Rustan’s to shop. Ortiz said it was clear “she liked beautiful things. She clapped loudly during my show.”

According to the New York Times report, Rosmah is “widely known [in Malaysia] for piling up designer labels, garlands of jewelry and a multimillion-dollar handbag collection that more than rivaled the shoe fetish of Imelda Marcos.”

Rosmah’s Hermès Birkin collection alone is reportedly worth $10 million.

Since Ortiz’s fabrics were custom-embroidered, they had to be shipped in batches to his Malaysian client, “with the last delivery just before their elections,” said the designer.

Rosmah asked Ortiz for a discount, which he gave.

Extravagance

The Najibs are apparently fans of Filipino designers. When their daughter married in lavish fashion the nephew of the president of Kazakhstan in 2015, they tapped Dubai-based Filipino designer Michael Cinco to make three wedding dresses and six evening gowns for the bride, for the ceremonies in Malaysia and Kazakhstan. (Cinco was made to sign a nondisclosure agreement.)

The bride also wore a dress by Lebanese couturier Elie Saab in the wedding in Malaysia, Cinco said.

Cinco, who’s from Samar, has an A-list clientele of Hollywood celebrities, Russian heiresses and Middle Eastern royalty. In 2017, he made the wedding dress of the scion of the Austrian Swarovski fortune at a reported cost of $1 million.

The Najib daughter’s wedding was headline-making for its extravagance, though Cinco said it was “normal” compared to the Dubai weddings he has done. “But the gifts for the VIP guests were all crocodile Hermès [Birkin],” said Cinco, who attended the Kazakhstan ceremonies. A crocodile Birkin can cost north of $150,000.

Cinco added it was on his suggestion that the Najibs hired US-based Filipino singer Lani Misalucha to perform in the wedding, after they balked at the asking fee of Celine Dion and Mariah Carey.

Also on Cinco’s recommendation, veteran Filipino makeup artist Patrick Rosas did the bride’s makeup in
Kazakhstan, where the celebrations stretched to four days, “and they flew in 200 guests from all over the world,” said Cinco.

Nice and humble

Cinco had been making clothes for Rosmah long before her daughter’s wedding. She paid so well that “her orders could sustain the salaries of my 150-person staff for a year,” he said. “But her style isn’t my forte so I recommended she go to Inno Sotto. I don’t know if they contacted him.”

Cinco has been a guest of Rosmah in the prime minister’s residence in Kuala Lumpur, though he declined to attend the wedding there owing to the political climate.

“The First Lady was so nice and humble. She was very different from how the media portrays her,” Cinco said. “She always asked to see me whenever she was in Dubai.” Photos, however, were always a no-no.

‘“I guess there goes my Malaysia show,” Ortiz said with a laugh, recalling Rosmah’s informal invite to him to do a fundraiser show for one of her charities.