Two Days in Bangkok

I went on a breakfast date with a friend before leaving for Bangkok, on my way back to Manila for the latest Philippine Fashion Week.


In immigration I spotted this chika girl. Too bad I was afraid of getting a clearer picture of what she's wearing.


I passed by a convenience store to buy water. I got hungry so I bought this Indonesian Satay flavored Pringles. Very interesting. When I was Roxas City recently I tried the Nori flavor. I'm liking all these unusual flavors Pringles is coming out with.


When I arrived in Bangkok I decided to just hang-out at Dean&Deluca.


Free WiFi made it a cool place to just relax and recharge after a long trip.


The garden area is chic, too.


I had some Iced Caffe Latte and Tuna Nicoise Salad.


My first day ended with a very late dinner at Telephone with my very good friend Julius. We spent the whole time blabbing about so many things! I like bonding moments like that.


The next day I spent the whole day going around to different shops and malls. The highlight was finding the new store location of wwa. This Thai label is edgy, cerebral and quite quirky in everything that they do. So the store location follows a concept that you have to 'find it'. This time it was on the 3rd floor of a building with a pizza restaurant and an ice cream parlor below it.


Photos of their new designs greet you and then you know you've found it. No signs except an A4 paper with wwa printed-out.


I was looking for a jacket by The Alchemists, a menswear label that they stock. It's one of my favorite Thai brands. I ended up getting 2 wonderful additions to my growing The Alchemists collection. My first piece is a shirt with pants detail that I blogged here.


This new space of wwa is much bigger than the previous ones. This I think is the 5th space incarnation.


I'm loving a bigger display of accessories.


The black jersey covered seats were kinda spooky.


There's an atelier feel this time. I wanted to just stay there the whole day.


Before leaving for the airport I ate at Hai with Julius. It's my second time eating there and it's safe to say another fave place of mine if you want some real Thai food. Very carinder-eque, I know!


We indulged in double orders of flaked catfish, spicy (and I mean REAL SPICY!) squid and somtam, a papaya salad, with salted eggs. Not so much a meal for champions but definitely something Anthony Bourdain would love.

Nature Boy

This was the fashion editorial I contributed for the June 2011 issue of F Magazine. The whole concept was about this guy who loves hanging outdoors and day dreaming but still looking chic and fashionable. It's so Mori Boy, non? The clothes I used has an eco-chic slant in colors of the earth. I was assisted by my friend Julius Salvador Labay, his first styling gig, so it was so much fun! I'm really liking this photography stuff I'm doing. I'm planning to do more.

Stella

Inspiring...

Portrait by Karl Lagerfeld.

Pieces

After two seasons of experimenting with loud colors I'm back to my preferred darker palette for fall/winter 2011 fashion season.

DP fw 2011 on StyleBible

Thank you to StyleBible for documenting all the shows for Philippine Fashion Week.


Jae Pickrell of StyleBible writes:

For the past two seasons, we've known him for his use of bright colors and experimentation with sportswear material for a distinctly urban aesthetic; but this season, Don Protasio takes a decidedly muted turn towards nomadic motifs. Using lightweight cotton and overdyed linen fashioned in voluminous, albeit featherlight tent-like silhouettes, Don presented a ten-look collection that represents his own brand of minimalism: "I wanted the pieces to evoke a sense of ease, almost anti-design design."

The accessories deserve a special mention. Don collaborated with new Filipino label Os, which designed the polyurethane "bones" that anchor the oversized, triangular contours of the nomadic garments. Noteworthy also are the split-toed shoes inspired by Japanese jika-tabi boots, which round up Don's roving collection.

Here's what's on my mind when I did the collection:

Inspiration - I started with the idea of release and thought of doing tent inspired shapes. Images of nomadic tribes living in the desert directed the color and subtle details. I didn't really want it to be so ethnic looking so I reduced the cuts to the most basic up to what I'm comfortable with. I wanted the pieces to evoke a sense of ease, almost anti-design design. Like what Diana Vreeland famously said, 'Elegance is refusal'. I guess, my own kind of minimalism. It was a reaction from my last two collections where I experimented with color and sports wear details.

Materials - Very lightweight cotton in greige and linen with over-dyed layer to get the textured wrinkled effect. I decided to use these fabrics because it's travel friendly. The whole collection I showed in PFW fitted in a large Longchamp Le Pliage bag. That included hangers and three pair of shoes for the guys. It has been my obsession to come up with pieces that borrow elements from a 'resort' point of view without my clients looking like tourists. I for one don't do 'resort-y' dressing when I travel for vacation. I still stick to my urban sensibility even if I'm in Bali or somewhere else.

Accesories & Shoes - For the accessories I collaborated with OS, a new Filipino accessories label, who did the polyurethane 'bones' pieces. Amazing quality! I was thinking desert, dead skin, dead animals and voila! bones. Good thing their first collection was all about it, derived from their label name, Os being Latin for bones. It all fitted together for my concept. The shoes was inspired by Japanese Tabi boots and I remember seeing in a documentary Shinto priests using it for purification and burial rituals. I thought it's a nice little jarring detail because some of my pieces evoke a very Japanese feel even though I wasn't really deriving my main inspiration from there.

Mori Boy

Mori Boy (Forest Boy)

The team of Edrick Bruel, Mike Magallanes, Eugene Sugian, Thysz Estrada and model Maverick Lacson came up with this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful fashion editorial using pieces from my fall/winter 2011 collection mixed with Paradigm Shift. It's so funny because I texted Mike that my collection sorta reminds me of Mori Boy style, and this was before he told me they did this shot. He texted back, 'Surprise! Abangan'. So I was gladly shocked to see what they produced.

They seriously need to do more!

El Bosquejo Interview

Miguel Paolo Celestial of El Bosquejo interviewed me. Read here.