At the 2025 Sustasia Fashion Prize, Jaggy Glarino didn’t just show garments. He showed the world how fashion can move forward by walking backward, with intention.
In a world that celebrates speed, spectacle, and forecasting, designer Jaggy Glarino does something unexpected: he walks backward. Not out of fear. Out of conviction.
Jaggy Glarino didn’t come to the 2025 Sustasia Fashion Prize to prove anything. And yet, he walked away triumphantly having redefined what it means to be a designer who advocates for sustainability, in his very own signature.
“I was puzzled when I got the invitation, to be honest,” he says with a half-laugh. “I never really saw myself as a sustainability-focused designer. But the moment I questioned that, I realized—maybe I’ve been doing it all along. Just not the way the world expected me to.” And that’s exactly the point. Jaggy didn’t arrive in Bangkok with a campaign-ready sustainability pitch. Instead, he brought something rarer: a system of design grounded in modularity, cultural memory, and radical humility. His entry piece—a workwear-inspired jacket with detachable sleeves, panels, and layers—was more than a garment. It was a proposal. One that questioned disposability, championed utility, and celebrated reassembly as a creative act.
“Fashion loves newness, but sustainability demands repetition, reconsideration, restraint. That’s the tension I lean into.” What made his entry truly powerful was its context of intentional inclusivity. Jaggy collaborated with Filipino artisans skilled in bayong (local tote made of coconut tree leaves) weaving, basketry, and other endangered techniques. He incorporated piña silk, a noble natural fiber with deep historical roots in the Philippines. Every stitch and pattern held a story, and more importantly, a strategy.
“We talk so much about innovation, but what about remembering? What about returning to the knowledge systems we’ve abandoned?” he asks. “Sustainability isn’t just a technology problem—it’s a values problem.” For the global stage, Jaggy’s approach poses a bold challenge: sustainability doesn’t have to look futuristic to be forward-thinking. It can look like a return to community, a revival of forgotten skills, a refusal to conform to popular aesthetics.
“The world has seen too much of the same narratives around sustainability—minimal, sterile, technocratic. But in the Philippines, we have a different way. We make things with memory. We make things with contradictions. That’s not a weakness. That’s depth.”
It’s also an intentional strategy. Jaggy’s work forces a reconsideration of how sustainability is communicated and who gets to define it. As fashion’s global powers continue to explore circularity, traceability, and slower systems, designers like Jaggy provide a living blueprint: one that’s rooted in culture, and more so, in confrontation. “I don’t have clean answers. I’m not trying to be a savior. But I believe in tension. In the friction between tradition and the future. That’s where real design happens.”
Perhaps the most haunting idea he leaves us with comes not from design theory but from Filipino mythology. He speaks of the sigbin—a creature that walks backward, retreating as it moves forward. “It’s unsettling because it looks like it’s questioning everything. But that’s the point. If even a mythical creature of excess can change direction, why can’t fashion? Why can’t we?”
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of Jaggy’s work is that it doesn’t ask for applause. It asks for reckoning. His garments are proposals; his methods are provocations. His quiet insistence on integrity, on craft, on memory, on thoughtfulness, on emotionality offers the world something rare: an alternative imagination.
For Philippine Fashion Week, Jaggy Glarino is a quiet disruptor. A runway radical. A reminder that reinvention isn’t always about acceleration. Sometimes, the most powerful move forward is to pause, reconsider, and rebuild. This time it’ll be with clearer eyes, deeper roots, and sharper questions. Because reinvention is fueled by questions only a few dare ask.
