By Joy Agoylo
Few creatives move as fluidly between fashion, photography, design, and fine art as bitagcol. For the past three decades, each pursuit has informed the next, resulting in a body of work that refuses to sit neatly within a single discipline.
This year, she celebrates that journey with Thank you, Universe, a new collection unveiled through a pop-up at Power Plant Mall. The project also opens a year-long celebration marking 30 years since she was discovered in a Bulacan panciteria and introduced to Philippine fashion in 1996.
For bitagcol, the anniversary is rooted less in retrospection than in appreciation.
“Gratitude is such a big part of my creative process,” she says. “Before I create, it’s important for me to acknowledge all the opportunities that have come my way in the past 30 years.”
That idea shapes the collection from the inside out. Working once again with the archive of scenographer Gino Gonzales, bitagcol revisited vintage Maria Clara dresses, baro, and ternos that have inspired several of her previous prints. This time, the garments revealed unexpected forms. Their silhouettes became imagined beings —strange, playful figures that eventually gave the collection its name, Thank you, Universe.
The prints appear across her familiar signatures: oversized shirts, kamisas, sporty kimonos, robes, apron dresses, and sarong pants. New additions include a multiway wrap that shifts from skirt to dress, bubble saya, lace undergarments, and fresh color treatments ranging from saturated hues to stark black-and-white compositions.
Photos courtesy of bitagcol
Fashion shares the space with art. Silk prints line the gallery walls of the pop-up, alongside large-scale photographic works where Maria Clara and baro silhouettes take on almost celestial forms. It feels less like a retail installation than an extension of the collection’s visual language.
Bitagcol’s career has never followed a straight line. Modeling led to photography, photography opened the door to art, and art eventually found its way into clothing. Along the way came exhibitions, books, Bench Fashion Week, New York Fashion Week, and magazine covers. Rather than separate accomplishments, they read as connected chapters in an ongoing practice of image-making.
There has always been a strong sense of place in bitagcol’s work. Philippine dress, local history, and cultural memory remain familiar references, but they rarely appear as straightforward reproductions. Instead, they are rearranged, reimagined, and given new life through print, fabric, photography, and installation.
Thirty years in, bitagcol isn’t revisiting the past. She’s still finding new ways to look at it.
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