For Mariton Villanueva, founding Himaya intended generating a model that acts as a complete antithesis of quickly trend. However it was officially established in 2019, with Villanueva’s university capstone task serving as the brand’s initial assortment, Himaya definitely has its roots in Villanueva’s childhood, when she would take a look at her extended family’s garments factories.
There, she witnessed some of the industry’s much more unethical practices firsthand, from the workers’ lowly compensation to the exorbitant quantity of waste. At initial, she experimented with to upcycle scraps, turning them into every little thing from yoga bolsters to hair ties. But she soon grew fatigued and disillusioned, by no means genuinely capable to capture up to the sum of squander produced.
Then in 2016, she was launched to the Filipino custom of indigo dyeing by her friend and style designer Luisa Jimenez of Entire world of Styles. She fell in really like with how the dyeing follow was so deeply rooted in the surroundings, using elements easily found in character to create vividly dyed fabrics. “It’s genuinely a passion of mine to operate with my environment,” she suggests. “My father is a farmer, so I have always been really passionate about indigenous flora and fauna and how they can be built-in into my profession as a trend designer.”
Following getting her training in purely natural dyeing from the Philippine Textile Investigation Institute, Villanueva traveled to Abra province, the normal-dyeing funds of the Philippines, to examine below the Itneg tribe. As she observed their Indigenous dyeing and weaving methods, Villanueva saw the possibility of producing a genuinely sustainable brand name. “I observed this new hope in the style field, in how the Philippines’ sustainable vogue can development around time,” she claims.
Villanueva’s dyeing components for Himaya consist of vegetable scraps gathered from current market sellers or foraged vegetation from her neighborhood. Previous 12 months when a typhoon felled eucalyptus trees at a university campus, Villanueva traveled to the internet site to collect the fallen leaves. For her canvas, she buys damaged rolls of textiles from apparel factories, treating and upcycling them herself. When she needs to use by natural means woven materials like piña or abaca, she resources them right from artisan weavers in Aklan, Abra, and Ibaan. “My solution is truly about functioning with the neighborhood, the people today, and nature,” she states. “It’s about generating a entire ecosystem.”