“Salcedo girls”—named after Makati’s famed weekend market in Salcedo Village—seem to all be wearing airy sundresses, neutral separates, boxy shirts, ballerina flats, or Sambas, with coffee or a bouquet in hand, and the care-free confidence made for TikTok
It used to be that families populate Jaime C. Velasquez Park in Salcedo Village during weekends at its famed weekend market. Kids are merrily going around the playground with parents perpetually watching. Dogs are being walked by residents who live nearby. There would be occasional joggers. And always there are those who come to sample Salcedo Market’s various wares and fares.
The summer has brought upon Salcedo a new demographic: Gen Zs who trek all the way to Makati to dress up and live the life of a Salcedo girl.
Inspired by the casual confidence of the New York City TikTok generation, who go around the city taking outfit check videos set in the backdrop of brownstone buildings, Salcedo girls are taking to Makati’s weekend mecca in their best dresses, hoping to, even just for a day, know what it’s like to gallivant about a neighborhood inhabited by well-to-do young families, expatriates, and newly mobile Zillennials of the renting generation.
To complete the fantasy, they’re dressing the part, too. The Salcedo girl uniform is specific: airy white dresses, presumably because the area despite being tree-lined, can be humid; ballet flats or retro low-top sneakers for ease of walking; the daintiest leather bag slung over skinny shoulders with bare necessities; a cup of coffee from a nearby cafe, or a small bouquet of flowers from one of the market’s stalls.
But this uniform also takes on many variations. Some, for example, dress in casual separates: a miniskirt or a flouncy skirt paired with either a sleeveless top or a slinky long-sleeved shirt; a boxy cropped T-shirt with wide pants. All this is to say that they really don’t deviate that much from this generation’s preferred fashions, just appropriated for a specific lifestyle.
The Salcedo girl may once have been a “BGC girl” decked in more or less the same outfit except maybe looser, more carefree, more apt for a park with manicured grass than a simulated utopia of Instagrammable modernist backdrops that seem to rouse in them visions of techno-futurism.
Just the same, the Salcedo girl is a master at mimicry. And thanks to our habit of sharing everything we do online, it’s just as easy for everyone to emulate different lifestyles and switch to a different one with ease.
The end goal materialized in an idyllic video of them walking around or doing the same template outfit check poses, despite seeming to be solely an exhibit of narcissism, is actually a kind of public service, adding more coal and hence more steam for the content train to run, so it could reach even more people who would take Salcedo girls’ place, aspirants to their role play lives, so the Salcedo girls can then move to the next “it girl” neighborhood.