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.]