Anatomy of a bad smell

By Marian Pastor Roces

The nerve

Let’s give Francis Libiran a partial out. The apology tamped down the furore, and sure, he declared a misstep. Moving on?

No. Unfortunately, the designer’s pivot into humility—a 360 degree turn from insolence—does not unconceal what was exposed about designers working with traditional textiles.

But first about Libiran, who may or may not have actually enjoyed the notoriety. For a few days at least. Both the conceited and humbled-down announcements may or may not have been written by his publicists. Or by AI. It just needs to be said that the switch and the difference in tone is machinic.

Both announcements were meant to steer public opinion.

In the first instance, Libiran-or-publicists-or-AI made a play with effrontery as self-promotion. He-they-it exhibited nerve as marketing ploy. But the very swagger made the description of the Maguindanao cloth swimsuit-cut, paired with a sheer, cowl-like bolero, hang around in the local netscape like a bad smell.

Like someone farted something rotten.

The designer or his human or machine avatars picked up shiny, blade-like words from current radical chic, aspired for cool, but inadvertently opened and let loose the field of fermenting gas where too many earnest designers are playing with the politics of indigeneity.

Weaponize, unapologetic, command, undone, stripped of nostalgia, with a bite, dangerous—a poseur’s selection. (ChatGPT should have warned Libiran.) In the Philippine hype landscape, these are obvious pickings for performing impudence.   

Seems as though an odor of self-satisfaction was the desired medium of communication. Because, of course, braggadocio triggers blowback. That’s bad but ultimately good for the brand.  

So, the first thing to observe of the original salvo is smugness. What it said was that branding exercises are acts of impunity. Needing no more than buzzwords, branding is its own morality. Hence, product marketing pays no attention to sensitivities. And indeed makes sensitivities the object of its dismissiveness—the better to fly with its crassness.

The second thing: devotion to Philippine tradition can be professed by anyone and should be meaningless in a letter of apology. In this case, it took a huge backfire to prompt the adjustment of language tenor.

Ignorance was then confessed: for not knowing any better, and for incomprehension of the very culture supposedly being appreciated.

Why, then, persist with this critique, after the public apology? Cannot Libiran just be left in the faded news cycle?

Violent extraction

Alas—for Libiran and his peers—this is a precious learning moment for the general public, in which the designer can only remain the antagonist. The Libiran hot air blast, while uniquely brazen, is also typical. The cohort of designers who work with traditional material and indigenous cultures share attitudes.  

The cohort shares an undetected contempt for source cultures, that is so ingrained that contempt can be imagined to be admiration. Such is the logic of, ehem, imperialism.

Such is the attitude that facilitated development aggression for many centuries. In this, Libiran is no apostle of the modern—rather, a reincarnation of imperial will, a someone from the past in avante-garde guise. No matter what a kindly soul he and his friends know him to be.

And in this, he shares personae with many of his peers as as latter-day colonisers. The supposed enthusiasm for traditional weaving (and other traditions) magically rehabilitates some very old ideas. Breaks wind again, re-releasing some very old, fetid smells.

Smells of: the automatic view of traditional culture as Raw Material; the convenient erasure of historicized human conditions at the sites of extraction; the heedlessness about the violence of shift from traditional social organizations to the cash economy; the inability to conceive adequate compensation, which should be well beyond what an impoverished weaver offers and accepts.

The creation of “industry” inside ancestral domains. The superficiality of “immersion” in source cultures.

Long list. It goes on. Lack of interest in the design community to work with veteran community organizers and peace builders. Self-imaginings as patrons and benefactors, absent self-criticality.  Deadly unfamiliarity with the textile traditions themselves (given that nearly all antiques are outside the Philippines).

The habitual extraction of patterns and motifs in complete disregard for overall composition. (As though you can cut an Amorsolo composition with scissors!) Meaningful collaboration? Not quite happening yet, when one party remains only a supplier,  no matter how and all power is vacuumed up by the other party. Including the power to “weaponize” tradition.

On dignity

To be sure, this list of transgressions is not Libiran’s—nor his handlers nor AIs— alone. He only occasioned exposure of a huge wrong perpetrated by too many designers inadequately prepared for working with peoples who have endured very serious marginalization; often, violence.

To be sure, there can be no romanticizing of traditional cultures in transactions where violence is felt but not exactly seen. Many of the active weavers today remember only fragments of the cultural complexes to which their own textiles belonged. Most now hang on only to the one memory that gives them hope: memory of the dignity vested in the textiles.

That dignity will not be preserved in the industrialization of traditional textiles. It is the nature of industrialization to dehumanize; and atomize creative work into “labor,” which can be measured, valuated, and monetized, but only at the least allowed level so profit can accrue to the owners of production.

Even designers of limited edition, boutique products have made traditional weavers into mini factories.  

Much less will technical/aesthetic excellence be preserved via this economic system, because the excellence of past weaves will disappear and become eroded versions repeated over and over until erosion leads to extinction.

About “industry,” therefore, a word legitimized by Cultural Industries rhetoric of the present decade and Sen. Loren Legarda’s exertions through well over two decades. [More on Loren in a future column.] “Industries” to produce “products” for “livelihood”—and even “specialties” for “fairs”—will provide immediate income.

Nothing to scoff at. But these projects will not provide for the dignity accorded to equals.

Because if the past century of these livelihood industries produced anything more than another version of hand-to-mouth existence, another kind of subsistence economy, there would have been no Francis Libiran who feels free to arrogate all cultural capital unto himself.

If these livelihood industries produced anything more than decay of dignity—that which accompanies decay of artistry—there would have been no Francis Libiran who imagined no responsibility whatsoever for common cause in enhancing dignity.

Caveat: Yes, indeed, there are a handful of designers who are trying to do more than these development agencies’ livelihood products and designers’ vanity marketing ploys and even more vainglorious fashion. They know who they are. Wishing them well, wishing them the ability to pick up sweet scents of hope, in a design field that often reeks something awful.

For those who salute Libiran for the apology note: in this dark field, much more than change of language is needed. And not only from him.

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Marian Pastor Roces works internationally as an independent curator, critic of institutions, and analyst of culture and politics. Through her corporation, TAOINC, she curates the establishment of museums. She is also a founding Partner of the think tank, Brain Trust, Inc.

She has long argued that governance, civil society action, and policy making in the Philippines are weakened by the absence of cultural analysis. Such analysis, in turn, needs to work with updated data. Hence Pulitikultura, Roces' platform for probing the intersection of culture and politics.