AVANT GARDENER
This column concludes the three-part series on textile conservationist and cultural advocate Raffy Tesoro’s bid to revive Philippine muslin, commonly known as kulambo.
Last week, I wrote about the economic potential of Philippine muslin, some of the challenges Tesoro and his team of 17 weavers have encountered, and the need to cultivate Philippine cotton if we want to be competitive in the premium products market.
Now, let’s talk about Tesoro’s plans with kulambo beyond mosquito netting, as well as the agricultural aspect of growing Philippine cotton.
At the time of the interview, the new wave of Philippine muslin has not yet been made available to the Philippine market.
“I’m still about 70 percent to getting them to the required thinness. Let’s say around mid or late this year, hopefully.”
In an era of air conditioning, electric fans, and heck, plastic kulambos, is there even still a need for a fabric that’s famously challenging to produce?
Yes.
“Other than mosquito netting, fashion. I’m going to make them into thin Cubanos or gangster shirts. I can embroider it and it’s nice and loose and we have a guy wear… a sando underneath [with] jeans and boots and it’s so cool.”
Tesoro added that he chose to situate his project in Ibaan, Batangas, because that’s where most of the country’s kulambo used to come from.
“[I’m reviving it] at the source. It’s not like I’m going to bring Inabel to them. That’s weird and disrespectful.”
As mentioned in my previous column, this project isn’t about weaving alone. Folks tend to forget that once upon a time, all our clothes came from agricultural crops, the most popular one being cotton.
And as Tesoro mentioned in the previous installments, the Philippines used to grow its own cotton. Before the influx of polyester and other synthetic threads now used in a lot of traditionally designed textiles, weavers grew their own cotton. Some farms grew them too, but they were edged out by more profitable crops like tobacco and sugar.
Now, he’s hoping to encourage farmers to grow Philippine cotton once again as part of a plan to put premium Philippine textiles on the international map.
“To make it make sense economically, we’re trying to mix it in with food crops on a crop rotation basis. We’re doing contract farming for corn and sugar…. What works with that? Cotton. [During] on the dead cycle for those crops, we plant the cotton.”
The plan, if it succeeds, is pretty intensive. “If we can make it, there would be four harvest cycles, depending on the type of crops you plant.
“For business reasons, you need to have a corn crop twice a year. Then I can put cotton and say, a legume, and of course we have a waste management system with organic fertilizers….
“Also investment in irrigation systems and water entrapment. [A] water catcher is essential because most of our farmland is rain-fed, I’d say 95 percent. That makes your harvest very iffy, especially with cotton, because cotton is a very water-hungry plant and if you starve the cotton of water, the fibers grow out to be very brittle, so it makes it useless.
“We’re still working on that, but hopefully, by next year or two years; we already have test fields, also in Batangas,” he said. “No more than five years.”
In a country where most people cannot think beyond the short term, a timeline of two to five years seems like forever, and many entrepreneurs would have deemed the project unworthy of attention.
But Tesoro, who is no stranger to the international fashion, advertising, and business community, understands that doing something right is better than doing something fast, especially for something he hopes will positively add to the Philippines’ stature in fashion, and by extension, agriculture.
“The goal of this project is part of a much larger vision… to provide a suite of products and techniques that we can showcase to ourselves and to the world that this is what we can do, that this is what we can offer, that this is what we are worth,” he said.
“We are a sophisticated civilization that’s lost its way.”