It’s hard to miss someone dressed in Salad Day threads. The Filipino designer’s clothes are loud and maximalist, an overload of kawaii stitched together by sheer will. His pieces, which are almost entirely one-off and custom, involve dozens of colors and types of fabrics: pink fur sweatshirts, strawberry-pattern bathrobes, frilly aprons emblazoned with Hello Kitty, and makeup coupon ads instead of logos. They gleefully push limits.
“My clothes are party clothes,” says Willar Mateo, the designer behind Salad Day. “If you go to the right party, everyone is wearing my stuff. But it’s almost more fun wearing it out in public because everyone stares.”
菲律宾设计师品牌 Salad Day 拥有超高的辨识度。那些衣服上成堆的可爱元素，被设计师随心所欲地缝合在一起，不禁让人感叹品牌的大胆与鲜繁。缤纷的颜色和布料，令每一件作品看起来都是独一无二的定制品：运动外套上抹过的粉红皮草、草莓样式的浴袍、饰有 Hello Kitty 的褶边围裙，甚至连品牌的 Logo 也被替换成化妆品折扣券的广告。他们对此兴致勃勃，并不断尝试突破。
“我的衣服为派对而生”，Salad Day 的设计师 Willar Mateo 说，“如果你去了对的地方蹦迪，说不定会发现所有人都穿着我做的衣服。但我建议你在公众场合穿着，因为那样你会成为万众瞩目的焦点。”
On a normal day Mateo’s outfits are simple, but he enjoys dressing up, and especially loves to take public transportation to and from the parties. He tells of one night when he and his friends left at three a.m. to grab an early breakfast. All twelve of them climbed into a jeepney with full makeup and wigs. “We love how people stare at us, like we’re crazy. It’s fun!”
虽然 Willar 很喜欢盛装出行，乘搭公共交通参加各种派对活动，但他的日常穿搭却很普通。他说，有一次和朋友在凌晨三点结束派对去吃早饭，12 个人浓妆艳抹，戴着假发，坐上了一辆吉普尼车 （Jeepney），“我们享受人们盯着我们看的样子，在他们的眼里，我们是疯子。这实在太逗了！”
Sometimes it’s hard to get a jeep to stop for him when he’s fully dressed up, but Mateo says the Philippines is mostly tolerant, and he keeps his sexuality, like his clothes, out of the closet. “I identify as platinum-card gay,” he laughs. “Most of my clients are gay boys. Most of my family accepted me, and even though I didn’t tell them, they knew, because I’m a butterfly.” His father, a lieutenant colonel in the army, expected a very macho and conservative boy, so to escape that, his mother sent Mateo to live with his grandmother in the countryside towards the end of elementary school.
有时候因为浮夸的造型，也会遇到拒载的吉普尼车司机，但 Willar 说菲律宾大多数人的态度都比较宽容。在大众面前，他也毫不掩饰自己的性取向，就像他大胆展示自己的服装一样。他笑着说：“我是彻头彻尾的同性恋。我的大多数客户都是男同性恋。我的大部分家人都接受我的性取向，虽然我从来都没有告诉他们，但他们都知道，因为我就是一只花蝴蝶。”Willar 的父亲是陆军中校，他一直希望儿子是具有男子气概的传统男孩。为了避免父子之间的冲突，Willar 的母亲在小学时期的后几年里，把他送去乡下和祖母一起生活。
Mateo spent his adolescence in an isolated village surrounded by fishponds. School was a thirty-minute boat ride away. Needless to say, the move to Manila for college as a teen was liberating. “I met people there who understood me and liked my style,” he says
That joy in being himself, in being an individual, is central to Mateo’s clothing: “I don’t like mass-produced stuff. I want the clothes to be special,” he says. “You don’t toss it into the washing machine, you hand wash it. I like the drama of it. It’s custom-made for you.” Anime and the early 2000s are big inspirations, but he takes ideas from whatever catches his eye. “Right now I’m experimenting with combining high and low fashion. Like, ‘It’s expensive to look this cheap.’”
因此，Willar 的少年时期在一个鱼米之乡的偏僻村庄里度过，他每天都需要 30 分钟的船渡去上学。而当后来搬到马尼拉上大学时，他感觉自己才获得了真正的解放。他说：“那里的人理解我，他们喜欢我的风格。”
这种做出自己、忠于个性所带来的快乐正是 Willar 服装的设计核心，他说：“我不喜欢大批量生产的东西，我喜欢独一无二的。不是那种扔进洗衣机里的衣服，而是必须手洗的衣服。我喜欢这种戏剧性，这样的衣服才称得上为你的量身定制。”
2000 年早期的动漫和时尚为 Willar 的创作提供了许多灵感，但同时，任何让他感兴趣的事物都能激发创作，“目前，我正在尝试将高级与低级时尚相融合。就是要打造那种 ‘看起来便宜，穿起来贵’ 的感觉。”
Radical individualism turns out to be fairly sustainable, too, at least in a world where so much waste is just laying around. “I use a lot of deadstock fabric or manufacturing rejects, because they’ll never be produced again. I also use a lot of fabric scraps; nearly half of my clothes are upcycled, made from pre-used material and scraps.” Mateo’s making the planet a tiny bit more sustainable, and a whole lot more fun.
在这个铺张浪费的世界环境中，Willar 的设计不但讲究强烈的个人主义，同时也具有可持续发展性，他说：“近乎一半的作品都是用旧材料和废料制成的，创作中用的许多废弃面料和瑕疵废品，它们都是不能再复制生产的。同时，我还用到了许多零碎的布料。” Willar 的衣服在具有十足的趣味性同时，更为世界的可持续发展做出了贡献。
Like our stories? Follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Instagram: @salad_day
Contributor: Mike Steyels
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li
