APEC leaders' shirts once a symbol of inferiority
APEC leaders' shirts once a symbol of inferiority
By Angie Ramos
MANILA (Reuter): When the leaders of 18 Asia-Pacific economies meet for their annual summit next Monday, they will be donning traditional Filipino shirts that were once a symbol of inferior status.
The barong tagalog, influenced by the European dress shirt, was first worn by Filipino men during the Spanish colonial period.
Constrained by the strictly hierarchical colonial society, the native Filipinos were not allowed to dress up like their colonisers who normally tucked their shirts in, according to historians.
The Filipinos thus had to wear the barong with the shirt-tails hanging out of their trousers.
The barong was also made of fabric derived from coconut fiber and woven so fine it was transparent, a way for the Spanish colonizers to reassure themselves that the natives were not concealing machetes or knives.
The Spanish ruled the Philippines from the 16th to late 19th centuries.
The elaborately embroidered barong tagalog, typically the unbleached linen color the fashion world calls ecru, has now become a national costume, worn by Filipino men on formal occasions.
"They wear it proudly because ... all the artistic nature of the Filipinos are impressed on the barong," designer Jean Goulbourn told Reuters.
Goulbourn and her Korean partner Eun Ill Lee, 38, have designed the barongs which the leaders will wear at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Subic Bay north of Manila on Nov. 25.
Philippine President Fidel Ramos will present the shirts as a gift to the leaders when he meets with each one of them before their meeting in Subic.
At their 1994 summit in Bogor, Indonesia, the leaders also wore that country's colorful traditional batik shirts.
Goulbourn says that her design was based on various window styles used in Philippine architecture.
"When you open windows, you see the world and the world sees you, so we're sharing our culture with the rest of the world and here (in APEC) we are aware that the whole world is looking in to your country," said Goulbourn.
The designer, a Filipino married to a Canadian, got the leaders' vital statistics from their embassies, then sent a rough prototype back to the missions to be sent on to the leaders' staff for feedback.
"We did some alterations for Chile, but that wasn't much. We did also some for China and not so much, it was just little things," said Goulbourn.
Designing for the leaders without looking at each personality was not an easy task, Goulbourn said.
But in the end, it was down to the basics of designing -- what would look good on whom.
"The one that was easy to focus on was President Clinton because he's the tallest one, so that needed a little bit of attention so that the embroidery would come out in proportion to his height," said Goulborn who added that it took three days for the women weavers in Laguna, south of Manila, to finish each shirt.
The barongs cost between 10,000 (US$381) to 13,000 pesos ($496), which is twice the price of a regular barong.