From fashion to food

I AM a fashion designer by profession, managing a corporation that operates two ateliers—our main atelier in Cebu and a branch in Makati that specialize in custom-made wedding gowns and women’s formal wear—and a ready-to-wear pop-up store at an upscale mall in Mandaluyong.

Around 50 people are under our company’s employ. Modesty aside, ours is perhaps one of the busiest and biggest ateliers in Cebu now, with close to 300 square meters of production floor space.

Without any formal training in fashion design and business (the closest thing I could get to business, finance and marketing, perhaps, was when I spent a couple of years writing business-related reports for a cooperative publication and a major business paper; 4 years of writing and editing financial and court case reports for a New York-based bankruptcy newsletter; and two years of managing web-based marketing copy and content for a multinational web-based business solutions company), I was able to grow my fashion company from an underground designer shop with a skeletal team of 6 to what it is today. (Whoa! That is, essentially, my writing and designing career, spanning two separate decades, in one complex sentence!)

After I opened the shop in Manila (we started in Eastwood City before moving to Palm Village in Makati), my usual workweek started to extend to weekends, during which I’d stay in the shop in the capital to meet with clients, while weekdays I’d spend in our Cebu atelier, my base, where I’d oversee production.

So, for the last five years my work schedule had seen me swinging back and forth between Manila and Cebu. Until everything turned routinary, performative; work almost felt like an affliction, in fact, such that it led me to thinking I was reeling into a creative cul de sac, out of which I needed to pluck myself quick.

Then it dawned on me, on one of the flights from Manila to Cebu a few years ago, that I should develop and set up a management system that would allow me to macro-manage the business, and afford me the time and space I needed to be creative once more.

So, I restructured the company, created departments with respective supervisors, who took on some of the management burden off my back. I hired professionals to set up our MIS, that would thread together our customer care, production, and inventory in one digital loop; fine-tuned our HR and company policies, and computerized our payroll and accounting systems.

It allowed me to work and access cash flow records, payroll, production schedules and deliverables, even our inventory, from virtually anywhere.

When I thought time had become such a luxury, I suddenly found myself luxuriating in my newfangled freedom with extra hours to do more creative work.  In the atelier, I poured myself into doing R&D, doodling on my sketchpad, experimenting on cuts, fabrics and silhouettes.

The efforts soon gave birth to our ready-to-wear line.  I got to spend more time at home, and found myself working in the kitchen, which was yet, to me, an uncharted territory.

I would devote 3 to 4 hours of my mornings (that’s from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m.) to work on at least one recipe every day, improving on my cooking methods. One week I would do classical dishes, and in the next, I would gather whatever ingredients I could find in the fridge and in the pantry, formulate my own recipes, and create my own flavor pairings.

(Most of the time, I’d overdo and overthink things that it was more of a trial-and-error exercise of food alchemy.) I didn’t realize I was already fashioning flavors, and discovered my penchant for modernist cuisine.

Needless to say, the creative endeavors I was doing in my kitchen was running parallel, if not complimentary, to what I was doing in my atelier.

Although, I must say, I was —still am—a neophyte in the former, trying to learn more, pushing to gain more confidence and experience.  The photos featured here are some of the dishes I made months before I went to formal culinary school.

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