These Handcrafted Jackets Beautifully Incorporate Mindanao Fabrics Into Modern Fashion

Growing up in Mindanao in the 90s, SNK ATK Design Lab Creative Director, Psalm Alfafara hated the shorts his lola made him.

Photo: SNK ATK Design Lab

She would sew “puruntong” cut shorts made with fabric from native prints, batik, and ethnic patterns she picked up from local traders. While his classmates showed up in their “bagets” short, Psalm showed up in his grandmother’s handiwork. He felt “baduy”, that his clothes didn’t look cool enough like the others.

He didn’t appreciate what he had until she was gone.

“It was only after my lola died that I finally started appreciating native patterns and the stories behind them,” said Alfafara. “This latest project is a personal bridge back to my roots. Each one is a 1-of-1, just like the stuff my lola used to make for me.”

That project is the ROOTS Noragi – a handcrafted workwear kimono-style jacket that joins a Japanese utilitarian silhouette with handwoven native fabrics sourced from Mindanao. It is the first release in SNK ATK’s ROOTS collection, now open for limited preorder.

Two Traditions, One Garment

The noragi is a Japanese farmhand staple. Loose, durable, built for long days of physical work. SNK ATK constructs the ROOTS Noragi from a sturdy 200gsm cotton ripstop base that carries that workwear weight and feel. But it is the Lumad fabric accents that make each piece singular.

Photo: SNK ATK Design Lab

“Lumad” is a Bisaya word meaning native or born of the earth. It refers collectively to the non-Muslim, non-Christian indigenous peoples of Mindanao — communities that have carried distinct weaving traditions across generations. Their fabrics are dense with meaning: intricate patterns built using heritage techniques that cannot be replicated by machine, because they were never made for machines.

SNK ATK sourced the textiles through local traders with direct relationships to the weavers themselves. Because no two pieces of Lumad fabric are identical, no two ROOTS Noragis are identical. The 1-of-1 nature of the collection is not a marketing choice but a material truth. The collection stays intentionally small, not to manufacture scarcity, but to honor the limits of what the weavers produce and to keep the practice sustainable.

Diaspora Is the Design

The pairing of a Japanese silhouette with Filipino indigenous textiles is a deliberate statement about how identity actually works for people living outside their homeland.

Diaspora is not a single culture. It is the accumulation of everywhere you have landed, worn over the place you came from. SNK ATK Design Lab was inspired by Japanese garments, American workwear, and the visual language of experimental and alternative culture — and those are what make up where Psalm Alfafara is from. Psalm’s ROOTS.

“Even if we live here, the feeling of alienation and diaspora applies to a lot of people,” Alfafara says. “No matter where you are, finding where you belong. That’s the feeling we want people to get.”