Ready-to-Wear: An Investigative Study on the Philippine National Costume
By JakeWritesSomething
Posted on: 6 October 2019 12:30pm
To assert that nationality, in the sense of the word which pertains to a form of personal identity based on a person’s place of birth, is a fully developed concept would be a demonstration of severely limited theoretical and practical backgrounds. The idea of nationalism, to which the notion of nationality finds itself perpetually intertwined with, has been subjected to substantial public scrutiny regarding its effects to the general human behavior. Nationality has played a crucial role in some of the most pivotal movements in recorded history, and this fact implies the significance of seeing nationality as a continuously reinvented mode of personal identification and social recognition.
Before nationality came into existence, earlier unifying ideas, like consanguineal and affinal kinship, have permitted a number of human settlements with rapidly increasing populations to thrive – even those whose territories are surrounded with and located within challenging geographies. It is historically evident that formulating collective identities is productive in relation to economic growth, political development, and cultural progress of a society. However, there are significant instances, such as the colonization period during the last few centuries, when the destructive potential of nationality is harnessed to serve a society’s narrow and selfish interests, thereby revealing the concept’s multidimensionality.
Correspondent to the different ways of exploiting the idea of nationality are the various styles of representing it. Tangible yet timeless metaphors are derived from select native entities, either living or nonliving, through culture-specific interpretations and institutionalization to materialize and immortalize a particular national identity. In the Philippines, the current primary arbiters of nationality-inducing symbols are government bodies, educational institutions, and mass media. But to leave the foreign triumvirate unaccounted – the Spanish colonists, American imperialists and Japanese militarists – is to be ignorant of the contexts which are crucial to the understanding of how the Philippine nationality was produced back then and how it is reproduced in the present. Simply put, the interplay among internal, external, old, and modern cultural influences is responsible for the complexity of the nationality ascribed to the people of the Philippines today.
Building on the brief contextualization above, this study has investigated on the prized attires of the Philippines. It is the principal aim of this paper to provide future researchers with an initial account of the historicity, inclusivity, and legality of the barong tagalog and the baro’t saya as the national costumes of the Philippines.
Historicity: Colonial Racialization
Multiple theories about the aboriginal inhabitants of the Philippines have been constructed by scholars, but what is primarily consistent among them is the claim that a significant number of Philippine islands have sheltered human communities. According to oral traditions and written accounts, these ancient groups have interacted with one another out of economic necessity. Trading surplus goods has not occurred in isolation, for it was accompanied by the subtle and gradual exchange of cultural objects among the participants. As geographically adjacent cultures grew increasingly complex, cohesive and divisive programs became more manifest. However, a number of Philippine aborigine theorists have suggested that there is no form of political organization anywhere in the archipelago that is significant enough to stand well in comparison with its counterparts in foreign lands. In other words, the Philippine communities are among the many targets practically waiting to be captured by predatory empires of the time.
Clothes are historical objects, bearing the narrative of the everyday lives of the bodies they cover. Fundamentally, the clothing of a community serves an adaptive purpose in relation to the meteorological climate that their territories are subjected to. But the clothes themselves have provided the artistic members of the community the vehicle for visual representations of their belief systems. The seemingly invisible interplay between the adaptive and aesthetic aspects of clothing is noted by Laura E. Perez, a decolonization theorist and a Chicana archivist, when she declared, “Within the metaphor of the social body as text, dress and body ornamentation speak, in this sense, both of how they are inscribed within the social body and how they, in turn, act upon it” (219).
