What if the things we leave behind could become the materials for who we become next?
In Chlorophyll Hexagons: The Body in Impermanence, Cebuano designer and UP Cebu Design Program Instructor Mr. Edwin Ao explores the relationship between fashion, material transformation, and the evolving nature of identity. By bringing together organic forms, urban imagery, and unexpected materials, he reimagines how clothing can express the ways people and the world around them change over time.
Working across fashion, graphic design, and product design, Ao transforms familiar images and objects into new creative forms. Photographs of graffiti, street art, and weathered wall textures captured on his smartphone are fragmented, layered, and recomposed into textile designs. Through solar printing, which uses sunlight to transfer images onto fabric, he brings plant forms and feathers into dialogue with the textures of urban environments. Light, time, and material become integral to the creative process, leaving their traces on the garments.
These experiments extend to the collection’s construction and details. A restrained palette of black, white, and grey, accented with touches of brown, provides a visual thread across pieces that play with layering, contrasting textures, and contemporary silhouettes. Carefully considered proportions and precise tailoring meet unconventional embellishments made from electronic components, buttons, and photographs collected during Ao’s travels. Fragments of his earlier artworks are also reassembled into new compositions. Materials once associated with other purposes take on new meanings as they become part of garments and accessories.
Presented at BENCH FashionWeek 2026 on September 26 at SPACE, One Ayala, the collection brings these explorations together in a meditation on impermanence. For Ao, transformation is not limited to the materials used in fashion; it also offers a way to think about identity. Like the images and objects that are dismantled and recombined, people are continually shaped by experience, memory, and time. Letting go of familiar forms can create space for new possibilities.
Through Chlorophyll Hexagons: The Body in Impermanence, Ao presents design as an ongoing process of making and remaking—one that challenges us to look beyond an object’s original purpose or an identity’s familiar shape. What emerges when we see not only what something is, but also what it might become?
About the Work
Designer: Edwin Ao
Title: Chlorophyll Hexagons: The Body in Impermanence
Type of output: Fashion design collection
Concepts and processes: Material transformation, solar printing, chlorophyll-based imagery, and the recomposition of urban visual references
Type of output: Fashion collection
Creative approach: Solar printing, textile manipulation, image recomposition, and the transformation of found and repurposed materials
When Nature, Light, and Urban Art Transform the Human Form
