Manila's first woman mayor Honey Lacuna-Pangan transforms dad's Barongs into Terno

MANILA, Philippines — When Mayor Ma. Sheila “Honey” Lacuna strutted the long red carpet to deliver her 2024 State of the City Address (SOCA), she was clad in a simple, tea-length, blue gray Filipiniana dress.

It took her 25 minutes to reach her seat as hundreds of barangay officials from all over the city of Manila greeted her warmly with claps and cheers, some stopping her to take groufies and selfies.

The dress, with its simple lines, drew attention because of its unique design. There were obvious long barong trimmings that covered the blue gray dress and swayed with every movement of the mayor.

The dress designer, Jo Rubio, has been a name in the fashion industry for 13 years. He is known for his “structured draping “and unique Filipiniana outfits, particularly the terno, which has been worn by the likes of Miss Universe Pia Wurtzbach and Binibining Pilipinas Bianca Manalo. His 2017 terno worn by Heart Evangelista-Escudero at the 2017 State of the Nation Address was one of his more praised and well-known creations.

Rubio recalled how he and the mayor collaborated on this SOCA dress with the basic idea of using the mayor’s late father’s barongs as the focal point. He admitted that it was a difficult job to pull off but the final version of the dress was worth all the sleepless nights.

More than the dress and its unique design, however, is the story of how this beautiful creation came to be.

The mayor mentioned in her SOCA speech that the barong trimmings adorning her dress were pieces of Barong from her late father’s Barong Tagalog collection.

During a conversation among friends, she also reminisced that the cut-up Barongs that adorned the dress were from Barongs that her father used during her swearing-in ceremonies from the time she became a councilor in 2004, to the time she finally became the first female mayor of the city of Manila in 2022.

It was a truly emotional moment when she handed these Barongs to her designer.

If the Barongs could talk, they would have shared a hundred stories of struggles, heartbreak and eventual triumph and joy as the feisty Manila mayor climbed the ladder of political success for almost 20 years to become Manila’s first ever