Store Specialists Inc.’s EVP Anton Huang with the winner of the evening’s style DNA award, Anna Hyatt and daughter Reona Ido
We’ve been watching you for a long time,” says Anton Huang, Executive Vice President of Stores Specialists, Inc. (SSI).
He meant Cebu as a force of fashion, and a retail destination. It took a while for the megabrands his company is known for bringing into the country to enter this particular part of the archipelago. And is Cebu ready?
We’ve worn and used Gap, F&F, Muji and Aeropostale for a long time, just some of the names under SSI’s stylish wing. The party they threw at Tavolata that coincided with the opening of the largest Zara store in the country (2,113 sq. meters of prime retail space at the expansion of the Ayala Center Cebu) proved just that.
The details enthralled me: flowing Moet, Tavolata’s impossibly rich liver bruschettas and the scent of Diptyque hanging low in the air. I think their most beautiful ambassador that night was a woman who came dressed in head-to-foot Zara, topped with a turban. “Hello, I’m Abby Asistio and I have alopecia,” she says, four songs into
her repertoire. Bald and beautiful, and hauntingly talented as she launched into her cover of Ellie Goulding’s Burn (to which Tamsin Booth sang to with gusto).
It seems like the excuses for dressing badly are dwindling by the SSI minute.
