The house.

Alba started as a complaint. We kept watching collections we admired arrive in market behind photography that undersold them. Not because the studios here are bad, but because the calendar never allowed a second attempt. A campaign got one shoot, and everything afterwards was a crop of that shoot.

The cost lands hardest on the cloth. Piña out of Aklan takes a weaver months and photographs like cheap synthetic if you light it flat. Inabel from Ilocos loses its indigo to an over-eager white balance. A terno’s butterfly sleeve is a piece of engineering, and it only reads if somebody shoots it moving. None of that is a retouching problem. It is a problem of who is in the room.

So the house was built the other way around. The garment comes in once, and everything a collection needs to sell is developed from that single fitting: the campaign, the film, the lookbook, the storefront suite, the market versions. Ten working days, and one address.

We are in Manila, two streets from where the samples get sewn. The work goes everywhere.