Our disappearing artisans

By Rhona Canoy

SO… I needed to find something to wear to a social gathering recently. This is a task which I would have eagerly attacked in my younger days. But my priorities seem to have changed as I’ve grown older, and now fashion hunting only seems tedious and uninteresting.

It isn’t that I no longer have an interest in sartorial detail. It’s just that everything is cookie-cutter now, and the probability of someone wearing an identical piece of clothing is no longer zero. This got me to thinking about how it used to be. Permit me to wax and wane nostalgic. They say it’s a sign of advanced age when one dwells on how things used to be.

There was a time when people had a neighborhood “mananahi” to take care of one’s sewing needs. It was odd, now that I think about it, that all my everyday clothes and my play outfits were couture. And my Sunday best was off the rack. We grew up across the street from Nang Lydia Almendrala. And her children were our playmates. No matter what we needed to be made, whether clothes or curtains, she was the one who painstakingly made measurements and put things together.

It actually was a big production, to get a dress made. First, you had to go and consult with Manang Lydia as to the proposed design, and she would figure out how much cloth was needed, and other accouterments like zippers, hooks, buttons, maybe a bit of lace. Once this list was made, the trip to the fabric store or the Cogon market dry good stalls was inevitable. And eagerly anticipated. Now that I think of it, my mama gave me the rare privilege (most of the time) of picking out the cloth which would transform into my outfit. Those patterns, or flowers, or bright plain pieces of fabric were pieces of dreams for me and must have made her cringe at times.

After bringing the purchases back to Nang Lyds, we would wait for her pronouncement as to how long it would take her to finish the creation. It surely would take a few days simply because she had other cloth bundles to attend to as well, so I would have to bide my time waiting. In a way, this taught me patience because I had no choice in this matter over which I had no control. The eagerness would be intensified when I could see through her window that she was finally cutting my “tela” from a pattern she made herself out of manila paper.

The tension of waiting to see if what she made would look exactly like the picture in my mind was sometimes unbearable. Finally, the fitting day would come. The first time that I would try on the almost finished dress so she could make final adjustments to be sure everything was just right. The sight of pins in the fabric made me so happy. She would mark where adjustments needed to be made, and finally carefully remove the garment from my body.

In hindsight, all the joy and excitement that I felt each time I put on a dress for the first time now seems so selfish. I took for granted the effort and skill that it took for Nang Lyds to do her magic. Never once in my too young years did I feel any sense of appreciation for her craft. And now there are less and less of these neighborhood seamstresses to be found. It seems department stores and ukay-ukay have made them kind of redundant. And the few times that we would like to have something special made, we pay through the nose to go to designer ateliérs to have them tell us what we should wear, and present their images to us for our approval before telling us when to come back for a fitting.

In our desire to be unique and to flaunt our individuality, we have surrendered the most obvious factor to mass production. Our clothes are not like other people’s not because we made sure that it was our vision, but rather because it is probably name branded, and unavailable here in our provincial city. And it is rarer if it costs an arm and a leg.

Like they say, hindsight is always 20/20 vision. Only now do I appreciate the artisans of my childhood. Manang Lydia and the whirr of her foot-pedaled sewing machine tops that list. And there were others whose craft we took so much for granted. There was our neighborhood cobbler who lived in a shack behind the Omañas’ house where the Medical Center old building now stands. We never worried when our shoes fell apart or needed to be shined because he was just across the street as well.

And the gentleman on his old trusty bike who would slowly wind through the neighborhood to sharpen the knives and garden tools. He was magical. We would see him in the distance and eagerly await his arrival. He carried his grindstone tied to the back of his bicycle, that purveyor of starshine. However long it took him to complete his task, we would stand by and watch as he restored our cutting implements to their old glory. That experience was literally about watching sparks fly.

These artisans of old are almost all gone now, taken over by technology and convenience. They mean for me a time when the world was slower when people paid more attention to the quality of their craft when they knew they were there to provide a valuable service. They also taught me the value of good work, of pride in oneself for a job well done. These are things I often wish my grandson would have had the opportunity to witness. I know he would have found them fascinating.

And, yeah. No matter how I look now, my mom used to dress me up like a little girl—with emphasis on dress.