Mea culpa

Okay, so I have failed you, my dearest darling followers, and did not keep my promise. But in penance, I will begin again from the date I have originally set, and will keep at it until I have paid for my sins, day by day, several times a day. There is nothing more hellish than having to behold bad fashion more than once a day. Once a day is fun, though, which was the original plan for this blog.

But I will grit my teeth and suffer through several a day.

On the other hand, why am I inexplicably filled with glee?

Scroll down.

Oh, the horror

Here is further proof that Regine Velasquez is indeed living in a time warp.


In this video she is singing "Shine," an Ima Castro original, and passing it off as hers, as if Ima Castro, a better singer, had never existed, and she is wearing one bright glittery silvery metal-mesh glove. Just one glove. One just one hand.


Michael Jackson comes to mind, in his Thriller era. The King of Pop himself has evolved into a ghoul, an actual incarnation of the Thriller era.


Could it be safe to say that her Mariah Carey butterfly imitation days are over? To be perfectly honest, though, I don't know which is the worse horror -- that she is veering towards an era of Michael Jackson imitations, or that she had stooped imitating Mariah Carey so she could be herself.

Bad night

Here we have another person who cannot seem to handle the idea of an unbroken black dress.


A photo of a different view of this dress does not exist, so I cannot be afforded a different perspective, but from this one lone photograph, I can say that there is nothing else I can ever see of this outfit that can make me change my opinion of it. Why the colordul sash, ala Beauty Queen? And, of all colors of the spectrum, why fuchsia and lemon yellow? I don't know what award she has won on that occasion, but she seems to be carrying a fancily-wrapped bunch of yoghurt cups, a fact that she seems to be trying to be happy about in her, ah, acceptance speech.

This was not a good night for Sharon Cuneta

Illiterates

I wonder if all entrants to Pinoy Big Brother are required to read George Orwell's classic novel, 1984. But I doubt it. People who read good literature naturally make sense, in life and in dressing themselves whenever they go out in public. Pinoy Big Brother people, on the other hand, don't seem to be well-read to me. Just look at the ones from the first batch:


Left to right: A man in a white shirt and with hair that a toddler styled, man wearing a pink floral scarf, a girl wearing a pink formal dress and a black fanny pack, a man who can't sing, a woman with no eyebrows, Mad Max wearing eyeliner, a girl who overdid the push-up bra, a generic-looking nobody, a diminutive matronly woman wearing a curtain and slippers, and a very tall four year-old.

What a cesspool of bad taste and useless drama.

Time warp

Regine Velasquez has got to stop fooling around with time. She has these strange long bouts of wearing the exact same dress over and over for years,
but sometimes, ever so rarely, as if in a flash of defiance, she decks herself out as if she were ten:


I'm pretty certain it's all to appear sweet and ageless, and, well, like a butterfly:


But she's almost forty, it's not sweet and ageless, but just so sad. Even Mariah Carey has stopped doing the butterfly thing half a decade ago.

Close call

Phew! I was actually worried that Susan Roces would, in the heat of her seeking for justice for her husband's death by natural causes, actually run for the Presidency.

Thankfully, she didn't, and the elections are over, although I'm no less appalled at what she has descended into. From this kind of FAMAS Best Actress:


To this kind of FAMAS Best Actress:

Bad memories

I'm aware that Vina Morales somehow has a concept for this entire look.


But it does nothing for me except to remind me about those overly made-up prepubescent majorettes from provincial public schools that I used to watch when I was a child, and wishing, wishing that I'd never be made to wear vinyl white knee-high boots, ever.

Subtlety works wonders

Even if Loi Ejercito does, to some degree, represent the plight of all wronged women in the Philippines (wronged both by her husband and her facial care expert), I still cannot seem to feel any sympathy with her.

Maybe it's because she's too literal.


I mean, does she have to be so in-you-face about being "in chains?" I'm sure it's probably a designer outfit and all (though it does not exactly look like Versace to me), and she must be making a point, wearing it when she is standing in some sort of convention beside her husband, each of them reading a novel, of all things, her copy of which she has marked in two different places, but no, I still don't feel any sympathy for her.

Range

This is supposed to be a wallpaper created by a Toni Gonzaga fan, but I doubt it.


It's such a bipolar portrayal of the actress herself. On the foreground, she stands there looking sleepily at the person using the computer (the puffy face isn't helping at all), while in the background she is in the throes of some kind of despair. Is this supposed to show her range of acting abilities? If it is, then I suggest the creator put in something more there, such as Toni Gonzaga brushing her teeth.

Advocacy

Ok. It's still unbearably hot and Richard Gomez and Cesar Montano are still running for the Senate. I don't know how Sarah Geronimo fits into all that grand design, but she seems to be proposing a new flag for some movement or other.


Note the symbolic colors (red for bravery, blue for integrity, lavender for women's rights and teal for -- ah -- singing.) And the buttons! I can't make out what they say, but from what I can figure out, the could be promoting some sort of clearer vision, an advice that Sarah Geronimo could benefit from herself, especially when she's looking in the mirror.

The short and hot of it

Ah, well. I'm back! Not fully yet, though, as jet lag, apparently, takes days to disappear. It also does not help at all that I have arrived back into my poor suffering country in the middle of perhaps one of its hottest summers ever, from a country across the Pacific that is just getting into spring. That, and to realize that Richard Gomez is still running for Senator, is enough to keep me makeup-less and in bed watching old Maricel Soriano movies over and over again.

But I have not been abducted and thrown to the lions by the people I have, er, okray-ed in this blog. I am still my fabulous free self, thank you very much, and the only things I am slave to these days are gallons of unsweetened ice-cold dalandan juice and my beloved two-horsepower airconditioning unit. Now if only I could find a way to cart around these two for the trip to the mall -- to buy all the new celebrity trash magazines I have missed -- and back...

But since that is impossible, I suppose I shall have to brave the sweltering city heat. In a week or so, or after it rains, whichever comes first, I am going to blog again!

In the meantime, there's Maricel Soriano and ZsaZsa Padilla fighting over Gabby Concepcion.

Maricel Soriano: Are you doing it with my husband?!

ZsaZsa Padilla: Minsan.

Ah, bring in the dalandan juice!

Edibility

Blame it all on Celia Rodriguez for beginning the fad of wearing abstract fashion. With her, though, it absolutely works, as her face is so agelessly beautiful and always beautifully and glamorously made up and her bearing is so regal that she can wear a sack to a black tie gathering and still be lauded as the best-dressed person for the night.

Other people, though, just don't get it.


She looks like a badly done merengue pastry that had begun to melt under the bright and hot kleig lights. She is Goldilocks-bakeshop-slash-high-school-home-economics-first-attempt
-at-icing-slash-modern-art-disaster-who-did-not-even-do-her-makeup-right. If she was trying to imitate Celia Rodriguez, all she was able to ape successfully was, perhaps, well, the silhouette?

[Photo from S Magazine.]

Looks familiar

Another starlet gone the way of Rosanna Roces. I can almost hear the printed flowers on her tube top groaning against the stretching.

And as the plot of the lives of these creatures (the women, not the flowers) go, I can almost see Katya Santos fifteen years from now, seventy pounds heavier, a grandmother to some b-rated philandering-husband-slash-politician's grandson, a bar girl, and some large man's partner on a sex video.

Yearning for the end

She is wearing a long blond wig and a dark outfit with cream colored boots, and a messy-looking bagette with a little fish hanging from it. Her scarf looks like the tablecloth in that news clip I saw over TV Patrol lately, where a woman was being interviewed in the kitchen of her house in the Tondo district because her husband, high on drugs, climbed a nearby billboard and threatened to jump to his death. She was saying, "Di ko alam kung ano nangyayari diyan." ("I don't know what's been happening to him.")


I wish we could have been just as ignorant of Jolina. But she has been infecting us for so long. Till when are we supposed to bear with this anomaly?

Anatomy

I wonder who it was that said that models should have long necks.


Because we sure need that person now, if only to tell Jomari Yllana that he has got no business being a model if he lacks a neck.

But then again, I suppose I could invoke that powerful phrase, "only in the Philippines," to justify why people who are lacking a body part can still be popular enough to gain mass appeal in doing the job that requires that lacking body part, as in the case of high school graduate Manny Pacquiao running for Congress without the legal brains.

Horror story

Dinky Soliman has a streak in her hair and in her sensibility. I mean, it's one thing to have a red streak in one's hair when one is in her twenties. But when one is of the age that Dinky Soliman is evidently in, and of the physique that is definitely not twentysomething, and wearing fashion that is definitely not twentysomething, then the streak is simply off. Who can trust and listen to a woman who wears her hair like that?

No wonder this guy is looking at her with such a horrified look on his face.

Could not care less

It's not that she's dressed like a Lara Croft wannabe and that her co-star in the movie is dressed like Indiana Jones with the hairstyle of Jacky Chan.


It's just that the way her knife is placed at her pelvis, she'd end up poking holes into her thigh when she runs.

Which only proves, I suppose, that movies that are copies of a series of movies that are: a.) based on a video game that is based on the mysteries of antiquity, and b.) a combination of various other movies and novel and other lessons of history, are getting more and more confused from the various levels of adaptation, so much so that they have failed to take into consideration the common sense behind the proper and non-deadly placement of knives in one's belt.

I'm not going to watch that movie. let me know if she ends up with gaping wounds in her thigh.

*Yawn*

[Photo from Yes! magazine.]

Cruelty

Ah! Here's another incarnation of the vile bubble skirt, but this time with a twist. Apparently the eighties is back. The teased and hairsprayed hair, the 'closed-toe shoes,' the black-and-pink cocktail dresses with the Joey Albert skirt (but this time rendered as a vile bubble skirt). I find it perplexing. I never really liked the eighties because that is the decade where That's Entertainment ruled afternoon television and Sharon Cuneta got married to Gabby Concepcion and Raymond Lauchengco began wearing torn and patched denim jeans and jackets and Aga Muhlach was having sex with Janice de Belen and Jolina Magdangal was conceived. The way I see it, any person who would dress in fashion even remotely close to the fashion of the eighties is just being mean and hurtful to the rest of us who had suffered -- albeit survivied -- the bad taste of that decade.

The clowning

I've always wondered why the Filipino masses have this constant nagging need to see the most popular personalities in the society look like fools. It's bad enough that our showbiz reporters for radio sound like dumb little illiterate escapees from the mental asylum, constantly yelling "odiba?" every single phrase or so, and calling every single male "Papa" before their names, as if it were a title like "Attorney" or "Professor," and referring to themselves as "ang lola moh." But to have actual news anchors dress up like misplaced adolescents and sign and dance like your regular entrant to yet another badly-done star search is a sign that the society has caved in on itself and is beyond extrication, even by the ever almighty United States government.

Ted and Korina have descended into the abyss.

[Photo from The Buzz magazine.]

History repeating

This photo has so many levels. On one level it's just a modern couple badly-dressed in faux Filipiniana. On another level it's a parody of the classic Philippine marriage, where the man is a "high-ranking government official who is also a philanderer" and the woman is a home maker with half a dozen children and goes to church everyday yet still refuses to see that her philandering husband probably has another half-dozen children with about a half-dozen different women. And on still another level, it shows, in such horrifying detail, that we are still back in the 1800's, where women wore ternos and were blind and kept mentioning "God" twice in every sentence and refuse to see that a wedding and a marriage contract does not a happy marriage make, and men were, well, the kind who used pomades... and that's the least of it. I don't want to get started on that, really.

[Photo from The Buzz magazine.]

Variations on a theme: The chin-poking bow

It must be true what they say. There must be something about winning that is particularly humbling. Why else would Sarah Geronimo and Yeng Constantino feel that they need to wear dresses with stiff bows in the bodice that would poke their chins and require them to stand proudly instead of bowing their heads to the ground in humility?





[Both photos from Yes! magazine.]

Give them a break

I honestly think that if two people -- any two people -- love each other, then everyone else should pretty much just leave them alone. So we should pretty much leave these two alone. They are so obviously into each other.


Just look at them. They even do each other's makeup and share the same lip and cheek stain. If that's not love -- and proof of his being straight -- then I don't know what is.

So cut it out, people. You're just jealous.


[Photo from Hi! magazine.]

Still seven, I see

The makeup is good, the hair is acceptable, her skin tone is remarkably attractive, the style of the dress is cute, and even the color is nice. But what's with the bow? And why put something so primary-school at the front of the dress, when every grade-schooler knows it should be at the back of their party-slash-Sunday-frills-and-lace attires?

I cannot understand Jolina Magdangal. I don't know her personally (of course I don't, or else she would have already tried to scratch my eyes out with her blue-painted fingernails and then the entire country would be watching me on TV Patrol World with deep gouges on my wonderfully and subtly rouged cheeks, being pointed at in a very angry manner by a polka-dotted and psychedelic-colored outfit that has Jolina Magdangal inside of it, with Mario Dumawal smirking somewhere around the frame) but I can perhaps safely say that she does have a penchant for large bows and ribbons, layering different-textured garments, putting together clothing with colors that clash, and other tricks of the seven year-old vying for Daddy's attention. I can also safely say that she must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight, so I'm thrown by the sincere and concentrated effort to look about twenty years younger, which I would be able to understand and sympathize with were she, in fact, fifty.

But she is, in fact, in her twenties. But maybe she really is seven. At any rate. I would never know. I don't know her personally, so I cannot ask, lest she put her blue-painted fingernails to my perfectly made-up face.

[Photo from S magazine.]

In repentance?

Apparently John Estrada dressed like a confused fourteen year-old boy living in 1984 for a sort of awards show where he was lauded as the Best Dressed Male Artist or some such other honor.

I've always thought a Best Dressed Anything should be more because of a style that respects the rules of good taste and decency. But I also believe that, so some degree, it is also because of an original style that, though strange, nevertheless works, with the elements blending together so seamlessly that we don't notice the strangeness of each element at first and see, only after a few hours of staring, that the Best Dressed Anything was actually wearing 12 necklaces or something, but that they, well, work, and give the impression that the Best Dressed Anything had not su much grown into his or her outfits but had actually been born in them.

So I am confused as to why John Estrada had gotten the award, because that rosary hanging around his neck is just so glaring to me, even much more so than the hot pink brocade blazer over a red-brown t-shirt. Is he asking for forgiveness and redemption from the heavens and the gods of fashion because he is dressed like Madonna in the eighties? With perhaps another ensemble, the Chuck Taylors would have been excusable, but with the plea for forgiveness and redemption and the tribute to one of the Roman Catholic Church's mortal enemies, the shoes just add to the confusion. Is he hoping for plenary indulgence, or defying his atonement?

[Photo from Yes! magazine.]

Respite, despite, in spite

I have gotten back from a week-long emergency business trip to find out that the Laitera has critics! I am being bashed. The most recent comments are rather spiteful, and I am one to speak because I know spiteful (imagine me saying this with my voice just dripping with irony). It really made my evening, because it means only one thing: I have arrived!

Perhaps a few thanks are in order. To my faithful readers who keep encouraging me to keep making lait, to the critics who have proven that sometimes sensible humor has truly flown the coop -- or perhaps they simply wished they thought up the idea for this blog first -- to my dear friends who keep leading me to online photos of people whose fashion sense and good taste had deserted them, to the piles upon piles of local celebrity magazines out there for the use of their terrific photos, and to the numerous fashion icons and non-icons, the real stars of the Laitera Blog, who keep giving me fodder for blog posts, without whom this blog would not have existed,salamat.

Whew! Nothing like vile reader's comments to get me going on to the even viler task of making lait to people dressed in the vilest thing of all, the vile bubble skirt.

Let me just sit down, catch my breath, finish my latte, and then I'll dive right into my pile of celebrity magazines -- which I sorely missed -- with gusto. This is a fabulous homecoming!

The protégé

Kim Chiu is wearing a kindergarten student's fluffy puffy-sleeved white blouse over a Makati employee's pin-striped long-sleeved shirt, a long string of fake Baclaran beads from Aling Oryang the Quiapo fortune-teller, and a short-stemmed red rose grabbed from her boyfriend's ex hanging limply off her starched collar.


I do not know whether to laugh or to cry, because it seems like we have a new Jolina Magdangal, after the original Jolina has run off and gotten married, which I still have not gotten to accept by the way -- isn't she only thirteen? -- and so it is a lot for me to ackowledge the existence of yet another multi-layered, large-beaded, real flower-decorated dresser whose only talent is having been able to live with several other teenagers in a house with no cellphones, no television, and no dsl.

At least Jolina sings.

But then again, no. She does not sound nice. And I do not want any other younger incarnation of her.

[Photo from Hi! magazine.]

Variations on a theme: The bedsheet print

It's not as if the print was so original, as I distinctly remember my parents having a bedsheet with the exact same print, but on a white background, and that was way back in the seventies. And it's not even that the print can be touted as "vintage," never mind that it had come from a seventies bedsheet.



It's just that using a bedsheet print for a dress for an awards night is quite appalling, an insult, even, to the award-giving body, even if it were the MMFA, which it wasn't, by the way, and to have two different women wear the same print on two different dresses, presumably -- and I fervently hope -- designed by different designers, is even more disturbing. Just like the direction that Philippine cinema is going, what with all the rip-off fantasy movies and the rip-off treasure-hunting movies and the rip-off psycho-suspense movies, everyone might as well rip off their couture and wear real actual bedsheets from Wamsutta twisted around their torsos, for all it's worth.

[Assunta de Rossi's photo from The Buzz Magazine, ZsaZsa Padilla's photo from Yes! magazine.]

Variations on a theme: The disaster bangs

Lately I have begun to wonder if there was an army of craft scissors-wielding four year-olds let loose in Metro Manila to happily slash away at anything they can get their hands on. The bangs I have been seeing lately certainly look as if they have been cut by elements from this lethal army.

Rica Peralejo somehow seems like a likely target, as her flat moon-face could have been so bright, giving an irresistible invitation to the army, which I can almost see turning to her and murmuring, "Oooh. Shiny," and then charging head-on with their scissors with multi-colored plastic handles.


Ditto Lorna Tolentino, although she looks more like a formerly bald person now growing out her hair while wearing a wig, except that her wig somehow got off-kilter and so her real short hair is showing.


The horrific thing is that it's not a wig, but very very real. And what's even more horrific is that there is, of course, no army. These women actually chose to look this way.

[Rica's photo from The Buzz magazine. Lorna's photo from Yes! magazine.]

Variations on a theme: The flower dress from hell

I'm not sure if this is a fad. First, we have Kitkat dressing up like a badly-rendered origami tulip and ending up looking like a giant flower-like alien from a horror sci-fi movie at the Metro Manila Filmfest Awards, as shown in a photo from a previous post and reposted here:


Then we have Jennylyn Mercado looking like a giant flower that has already wilted at the Luna Awards, an image further encouraged by the wilted-flower color of her dress.


Furthermore, it seems like the petals have grown into her arms and have eaten most of them away, leaving her hands just hanging there, dead and immobile and ineffectual, and it was after this meal that they died, poisoned by something remotely reptilian in Jennylyn's blood.

Kitkat's petals shoot upwards, in fear of the ground that she has trodden on and has thus rendered barren, while Jennylyn's petals droop downwards, perhaps to try to get away from the face that had launched a thousand love triangles, with her always being the inevitably jilted one. It makes perfect sense, really. Fad or no fad, sometimes the clothes are more honest than the people that are wearing them.

[Photos from The Buzz magazine.]

Look who's (what's) back

I cannot believe she found the shoes that one die-hard Faces Disco goer threw away when the eighties were over. Did she not find the large round white plastic earrings that went with those shoes? And the funnel-shaped acid-washed "Used Jeans" that had the words "Used Jeans" stamped all over them? And the bright yellow cropped jacket with thick shoulderpads that had neon-colored geometric prints all over it? And for the entire outfit to be age-appropriate, may she please carry a Trapper Keeper and a Walkman that plays a cassette tape of a Duran Duran album?

Almost

At first I was afraid that Bubbles Paraiso was wearing a tan underblouse that did not cover her breasts and the blue satin overcropped mini-blouse was worn over it to cover her breasts and it was almost working until a photographer took the photograph from the wrong angle.

But then I looked closer and realized that the tan underblouse did cover her entire torso, and she was perfectly decent. Whew! That said, I'm picking a bone with that collar. I am afraid it's a sign that she is gradually going the way of people dressing up as animals. I can almost see it now. First she starts dressing up like dogs, then she starts dressing up like bejewelled dogs, and then she starts dressing up like bejewelled and overly frilly dogs, and then she starts dressing up like Jolina Magdangal.

[Photo from A-List magazine.]