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.]

Oh, the pain

Rosanna Roces is wearing a dress so tight that the floral print has actually stretched across her breasts, creating the illusion that the dress is composed of two different prints, and her "shawl," taken from a hundred year-old cavan that holds moth-eaten doilies, is tied lopsidedly at her neck by a safety pin.

Sometimes I wonder why I still feel pain for her. The entire country should be immune by now.

[Photo from The Buzz! magazine.]

Bon appetit!

Sandara Park deserves a panlalait post all to her own.


Determined to make an impact at the sham that is the Metro Manila Filmfest Awards, she came as a shiny poufy pink pastry decorated with circular merengue petals at the bodice , and with a skirt that also has a short train. Underneath her dress, though, in the area of her stomach, is not a growing fetus -- as she is not pregnant and even if she were, she is not likely to have the same sentiments about motherhood as Kris Aquino who wears baggy maternity clothes when she is barely three months along -- but a creamy whipped fruity filling. You have to hand it to her, though. Not being a Filipina, she thus knows how to dress appropriately for the occasion. Or it could be that she simply woke up in the morning and, in a rare spark of intelligence and prescience, thought, what better thing for her to do at a fake movie awards show than to go as fake diabetes-inducing food that eating too much of can actually can make one nauseous? At the end of the night, it looks like she had the philosophy of this year's MMFA right down pat. The entire awards season left a bad taste in the mouth.

[Photo from The Buzz! magazine.]

The legend lives on

Ah! The Metro Manila Film Festival Awards. I am always delighted when it is MMFA season again, as there is always, always something going on there that is not nice. Who can ever forget that sorry "Take it! Take it!" episode in the early nineties when Gretchen Baretto -- not yet in her present status as Her Royal Colorum Consort -- and the overstaying Miss Universe loser from Mauritius, Miss Mauritius, stand on the podium and give the Best Actress Award to Ruffa Guttierez, and then in the middle of the affair Gretchen belatedly balks and announces that the name she saw on card inside the envelope was that of Aiko Melendez? And now here comes the hullaballoo over a criterion pertaining to box office earnings. That's not the worst of it this year, though. The worst part is that the man who had infested the entire Metro Manila with those hideous pink-colored foot bridges and male urinals is one of the judges.

But of course people in the MMFA would act quite base, especially if they have the aesthetics of Bayani Fernando, and if they are dressed like these:


She looks like she was wrapped in a badly done origami tulip, where her torso is the misshapen stamen that ends in a huge ball of blond hair decorated with a bunch of long red fur. In a tragic tribute to the twenties, a bow with uneven ends is tied around the area of her hips, and the stem of this horrific apparition that it Kitkat ends in a long flare that is being held up by a hand (another stem? a leaf?) that is clad in black ruched satin.She is making a statement that not all flowers are beautiful and not all origamis are meant to be done right.

In contrast, Rachelle Anne Go has decided to come as a belted altar cloth.


And then comes Tanya Garcia wearing the vile bubble skirt in a most unflattering length.


This is, by far, the worst length that anyone can wear the vile bubble skirt, as it makes the wearer seem dangerously close to looking like this:


On the practical side, though, the vile bubble skirt can probably act as a handbag. Just an adequate sized slit among those folds in the hips can allow the wearer to carry inside the bulbous hem a bunch of keys, a credit card, a wad of tissues, her compact and lip gloss, a hairbrush, two stained and linty scrunchies, old movie ticket stubs and crumpled Starbucks receipts, used-up wifi cards, a half-eaten chocolate bar, various candy wrappers, a broken pencil, a ballpoint pen stolen from either a bank teller or a sales person in a mall, a weekly planner, an iPod Shuffle, a moldy old id photo from college, assorted loose change, a cellphone and charger, and perhaps a small bottle of mineral water. It will make a whole lot of ruckus when she walks that red carpet, though. But then again, stranger things have been known to happen at the MMFA.

[Photos -- except for the cartoon -- from The Buzz! magazine.]

The powers that can't

Ladies and gentlemen, the Laitera is proud to present you with a blow-by-blow account of the sartorial crimes of the President of the Republic of the Philippines at the recently held ASEAN Summit in Cebu City.

First, the Chief Executive arrives in Cebu wearing a seventies policeman's uniform.


She is wearing an oversized suit rendered entirely in khaki that creates an illusion of a FedEx cargo box bouncing along the red carpet. The untucked and superlong and oversized inner blouse have side seams that keep puckering, a trait of clothes that simply scream Baclaran. As she troops the line and salutes the colors she forgets that her handkerchief -- which dreadfully reminds me of Vilma Santos during her Vilma! days when she would scream "I love you, Lucky!" into the microphone that was wrapped with a white handkerchief -- should never be part of the salute.


The President is joined by Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia who showed her that khaki does'nt necessarily have to be drab:


Cebu Governor-Gwen wears a v-neck inner blouse that is several shades darker than her mocha cardigan, with a neckline that shows an elegant neckpiece. In contrast, President Gloria is paying a tribute to yet another Philippine institution, Manny Pacquiao.

Then, the duo of powerwomen proceed to inspect the Asean Summit site....


Gwen in sleek beige pantsuit (reminiscent of Ralph Lauren's all-American corporate chic), and pointed toe stilletos that give her a slim, elongated silhouette. And then Gloria in a rumpled bright bubble-gum pink pajama set patterned for the Teletubbies. Take note of her equally clunky suede clogs in a color that does not even match the outfit.

And then at the ceremonial unveiling where Gwen wears an hour-glass shaped terno, with flowing white drapings reminiscent of traditional Grecian attire.


And Gloria sings the blues in Mama Mon Chang's coordinates.



The country is in serious trouble. Only Cebu can save itself.

So this is what happened to...

Nikki Coseteng. She has become a fixture for drapery.


Not only that, she seems to also have become a geisha gone fat and drab that no obi would fit her, making her acquire the shape of a Matrioshka doll that contains a smaller Nikki Coseteng who has become a geisha gone fat and drab that no obi would fit her and making her acquire the shape of a Matrioshka doll that contains an even smaller Nikki Coseteng who has become a geisha gone fat and drab that no obi would fit her and making her acquire the shape of a Matrioshka doll that contains an even smaller Nikki Coseteng who has become a geisha gone fat and drab that no obi would fit her and making her acquire the shape of a Matrioshka doll that contains an even smaller Nikki Coseteng, and on and on ad infinitum, and when you keep opening and opening these dolls you will get to the core of the entire elaborate nestling system, which is actually a speck of glittery, glimmery eyeshadow powder.

It's quite existential, really.

Possibilities

I've always wondered what Lolit Solis was doing in front of the camera hosting tv shows. I'm sure her talent management agency is doing just fine, what with Gabby Concepcion and all in its heyday spawning even newer and newer controversies over her latest acquisitions. But this doesn't look like the person who has the right to be on television.



Maybe if she started wearing the vile bubble skirt and had her breasts augmented by Vicky Belo, and grow her hair longer so she can have it layered and colored and rebonded, and star in a movie that has her emerging from greenish river water in a white kamison and have a string of vile relationships with the likes of Bong Revilla, Andrew Wolfe, and that male model that supposedly keeps beating up Lara Morena, she could escalate to the status of Movie Star.

Separated at birth 2

Ladies and gentlemen, let us all welcome the Ly-Na beauties.



It's apparent that it is their mothers who taught them the benefits of using the thick and greasy Chinese medicated face cream and how to slather it on their faces to create shading akin to the espasol. At least we all know that the mother of the male twin is a living example of how to use face cream and get to the Senate in coiffed and face-creamed-and-powdered splendor

Someone is going to be thrown into the dungeon

Something is wrong with Queen Gretchen Baretto's face.


Note the nose in the close-up below, and scroll back up to the photo of her entire face.


She seems to be missing a left nostril. In Photoshopping her face, the Photoshop artist must have inadvertedly stamped some skin onto what should have been the small curve that would show that Her Royal Highness does have a left nostril in real life or else she would not have deemed herself too perfect for this world, an arrogance we all know to be quite unfounded anyway, as we all know that Her Majesty is not really Her Majesty but only Royal Concubine By Merit Of Her Sharing A Bed And An Illegitimate Daughter With His Royal Highness The Fat And Ugly King Which Actually Makes Her Not So Much Royal Concubine But A Colorum Consort, Which Is Even Worse. No wonder Queen Mother Imelda Cojuangco hates her.

But really, the Photoshop artist and the entire staff of the magazine that published this photograph should leave the country and seek asylum in Cuba, or else they will all feel the wrath of Her Royal Colorum Highness Queen Gretchen Baretto, She Who Has A Microwave Oven-Carrying Assistant Following Her Everywhere She Goes.

[Photo from Starstruck magazine.]

Wrong girl

When I first saw this cover, I did not recognize any of these people. I honestly thought they were some sort of small wax figures that were made to resemble one another, as proof that this incredible feat, gasp, can be done.


But then after about four minutes of staring at the cover, because it did look a little odd, it dawned on me that these were real people, Photoshopped to resemble wax figures. And then shortly thereafter I realized that these were real people Photoshopped badly. And then, in an instant, I realized that these were the fab four of the famed shampoo commercial that had one of them (girl three in cover) displaying her entire designer wardrobe at the shoot with a small army of personal assistants carting them in designer luggage and then the other one (girl four in cover) seething with envy over all that ostentatious display and then the third one (girl two in cover) taking the side of the first one because she understands the sentiment as she herself is also married to a foreign millionnaire after having been a part of the harem of yet another foreign prince in a rich oil-mining country and then the fourth one (girl one in cover) keeping mum about the whole thing because she is just that flat and predictable and so unremarkably staid and probably un-opinionated because she had never been part of a harem of a prince and never slept with a lot of men and so it makes me wonder why she is there in that quartet of pretentious liposuctioned social-climbing women instead of, say, Rosanna Roces. Because those other three, are, well, not so different from our favorite liposuctioned social-climbing palengkera, save for the fact that they do not have sex videos.

Twenty years indeed

Regine Velasquez, at the concert she held toward the end of 2006 to celebrate her first twenty years in showbusiness, was apparently an attempt to prove that she could change her fashion style.


Note the hair extensions, and the mound of densely-packed pink tissue paper that she seemed to have embedded herself in.

And below, notice the shimmering purple tights and a black lace mini-dress, accessorized with what looks like one of those flexible and stretchable headbands made of jointed plastic sticks, and what seems to be a several layers of gold chain necklaces, which we cannot see very well under the hair extensions.



And finally, the culmination of all that is bad in her twenty years of showbusiness -- bar Ogie Alcasid -- that somehow fills me with horror over what the next twenty years of her showbiz life would be like:


It looks like an angry puppy dog tore out a part of her skirt, which I suspect could be part of a plan, as she is smiling smugly, proud to be, ah, showing off parts of her anatomy that were meant to be kept hidden not out of modesty but out of shame.

I actually watched the concert in its delayed telecast on television, rapt with the ugliness of it all, and kept at the edge of my seat by the excitement over what Regine Velasquez would be wearing next, and the night ended with one rather horrifying thought in my mind: Does she, in fact, secretly wish she was more like Mystica? This would at least explain the fashion and the men.

[Photos from Starstruck magazine.]

Difficulty

I honestly never thought Vilma Santos would make it to this blog more than once, and via a contemporary photograph, and I have taken much of the morning deliberating on this choice, but see for yourselves. Not only is she wearing the vile bubble skirt...


...she is also wearing an extremely large necklace made entirely out of clams.


Also, the shoes are quite off. I would imagine a veteran actress and a city mayor who is married to a senator and is a mother to one grown man -- plus one little boy -- would not wear open-toed shoes with hose. Pumps would have been more appropriate, but we understand how difficult it must have been to select the right footwear, as she is wearing the vile bubble skirt and her extremely large necklace, which turns out to be the collar of her dress after all, is made entirely out of clams.

[Photo from Yes! magazine.]

Innovation

Wow. This photograph is proof that Carla Humphries has another talent other than smiling broadly at the camera to show her thirty-two bleached and polished and cavity-free teeth. Apparently, she has a natural knack for dress engineering, as when she has forgone the use of a push-up bra and has used her ruched red leather belt with a black shiny accent instead. which explained why said belt is not on her waist, as convention and the nature of belts dictate, but on the area right underneath her breasts. Notice, also, that it is not apparent how the belt is fastened, unless the aforementioned black shiny accent is a closure in disguise, which will go perfectly well with the entire theme of how the belt is used, specifically, as a breast support in disguise, and/or as a belt in disquise as a breast support. Although this makes me wonder if this belt-slash-breast-support is actually a headband from the eighties that had already enlarged and deformed itself from old age, and so if Carla Humphries makes a turn, we would see that the belt is actually clamped onto her midriff and not wrapped tightly against it, which in turn would also amaze me even more at Carla Humphries' fantastic philosophy of using things for purposes other than what they were invented for.

Victim

She's been crying.


And for good reason.

[Photo from pinoyrickey.org]

Please

And here we have another opportunity to make an anonymous lait, brought to us by our friendly global source of all that is young and tasteless, Friendster.



She must have been trying her utmost best to look pretty. Somebody please log on to IRC or Yahoo Chat and tell her to stop it before her skinny little neck breaks into two and her head plops onto the keyboard and presses the button to send spam and virus e-mails, or worsde, more photos of herself, to the rest of the world.

And to think this is what Google came up with when I searched for images of Cristy Fermin. Don't you just love Google? The thing has got such a fabulous sense of humor.

Friendly advice

For a beautician, Ricky Reyes should know when a face is good enough to display brazenly for public consumption. If he keeps insisting on gracing his own giant billboards along Edsa, he should get his own beautician and Photoshop artist. I suggest he contact Angelica Panganiban for hers. And I also suggest that Bong Revilla have a look at Ricky Reyes' hairstyle. This might make the Senator realize what he might turn into after too much working of that "gigolo" image.

All hail

I never fail to be amused by these three, and not in a good way. Kris Aquino, who keeps making a fool of herself as a person, made an even bigger fool of herself as a "talk show host" recently by not even looking up beforehand what a "blog" is and what this is for and how this is accessed, which is really really stupid, as the interview she was about to conduct with a top-notch female lawyer circles around a particular controversial blog entry. And all throughout the interview she kept saying things like, "I don't know what a blog is, I'm sorry, " and "How do you access that? Is there a password." Sheesh. Maybe she should be introduced to this blog.

Cristy Fermin, on the other hand, is just an unclassifiable creature. Not only does she appear to have no teeth and attempts to compensate for said lack of body part by getting another body part highly overdone -- specifically having mega-uber-super-tweezed eyebrows that make her look like Ursula the octopus in Disney's The Little Mermaid -- she also seems to dress in nothing but pantsuits composed of black trousers and tailored jackets with horrid prints.

Boy Abunda, on the other hand, is an egg.

But perhaps we can just hand it to ABS-CBN for putting together these three. After all, if the ABS-CBN could create a Jolina Magdangal and a Willie Revillame, why not the holy trinity of bad taste?

Tell me something I don't know

There are some things in this world I will never know. Some of these are:

1. Why John Lennon had to die,
2. Where Tiffany (the singer, not the store) is now,
3. What vile creature invented the vile bubble skirt,
4. What a conversation would have been like between Lito Lapid and Melanie Marquez when they were still lovers, and
5. How Joey Marquez could still be on television even if he is doing practically nothing anymore. (Hosting, say you? Hah, says me.)

Lessons

Both Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Senator Loren Legarda should go back to high school and relearn the following topics:

1. How to not be a sore loser.
2. How to never cheat.
3. How to find the right mate.
4. How to speak with the proper diction. (Slanging all your vowels doesn't cut it.)
5. How to manage people without blowing your top in front of the multitude.
6. How to understand macroeconomics, and the importance of crediting overseas foreign workers for helping bring up the peso value.
7. How to quit while you're ahead.

Or weren't they taught this at the Assumption in the first place? Tsk, tsk.