The wrap artiste’s Metta • Morphe tells her transformative journey to empowerment as expressed through the weaves of indigenous women
Banaca wrap artiste and multi-awarded fashion designer Ditta Sandico presents Metta • Morphe, an art exhibit featuring a series of deeply personal paintings that tell her story of recovery, rediscovery, and rebuilding.
Not just glamour
As a designer, Sandico strives to craft smart, timeless, stylish pieces using organic indigenous fabrics to promote the country’s natural resources and advocate a sustainable way of life. She believes that fashion equates to so much more than just glam and glitter.
Her passion for fabrics has, over time, transformed itself into a life devoted to promoting the use of these local textiles and supporting the communities that produce them.
To Sandico, it is not the finished products alone that matter in fashion. At its heart, it boils down to the more basic things: its essence exists in the building blocks of the creative process, like the materials, fibers, and fabrics used for each creation, and the hopes, dreams, and lives of the people involved.
It is the artist’s belief that fashion is about recognizing and remembering traditions and embracing them, incorporating them into modern inventions. It is about melding history and culture, art and beauty.
Joyful beginnings
Fashion, Sandico thinks, is about looking around and properly channeling our boundless creativity in order to continuously innovate and imagine ways by which we can create in a responsible manner. It is about defying trends and holding firm to the tenants of quality, longevity, and good style.
Each piece in Metta • Morphe is a joyful expression of a woman who is celebrating a second chance at life, blossoming out of a cocoon, and being wholly and unapologetically herself. Each woman is dressed in gracefully crafted indigenous fabric, woven by women of the Mangyan tribe and carefully draped by the designer’s expert hand.
With this exhibit, Sandico wants to push the boundaries of Philippine heritage by bringing architectural pieces made of banaca fabric and habol weaving to life, radically stretching the limits of what indigenous fabrics can do and what they can express in fashion and the arts.
Metta • Morphe runs until June 30 at the Dolce Ditta Gallery, No. 5 Mabolo St corner Balete Drive, New Manila, Quezon City. For more information, call (02) 8571 8922.
