Photographed by Borgy Angeles for the November 2024 Issue of Vogue Philippines
Construction Layers’ Kendrick Cay and CP Garcia imagine new futures in tactile expressions and moving, elusive silhouettes.
CP Garcia picks apart at seams whenever his eyelids begin to fall. It’s an occurrence that’s not unlike coming off hours of playing Tetris and imagining a new set of falling blocks to stack. But instead of puzzle pieces, the designer sees the loose stitches he has yet to finish on a garment. These visions come to him more frequently within a month like this one, as he and his co-designer Kendrick Cay work on putting out a new collection for their brand Construction Layers. “You know, that’s why I don’t like bringing samples home,” he sighs, giving a slight smile. “I know myself.”
“He doesn’t sleep!” Ken chimes. He’s laughing now, perched on a stool beside CP in their design studio in Muntinlupa. Light filters in through white blinds, casting shadows on the center table typically piled on with the fabric, flat lays, and measuring tools they use to cycle through the motions.
The space is unusually vacant for a Friday morning; if they hadn’t freed up their day for Vogue, their master tailor Kuya Erneng and a sewer would be by machines whirring at work, with CP fine-tuning the details that make it to their final pieces. Between the design duo, he oversees the operations that run from Mondays through Saturdays. The work is so meticulous, he says, that it’s why he’s begun losing sleep over it, seeing the warp and weft of their fabric in his dreams.
But it’s like that for Ken, too. On the day-to-day, he handles their press and marketing, but the design process is constant. “Like, I’m on Instagram, scrolling through stories and all that, and I start to think, ‘Wait, what if this design works on this fabric?’” he says. “I’m going to find myself up until 3 AM just thinking about it. It’s always like that.”
Construction Layers is the open tab running in the background of their days. That’s how it’s always been since they established the brand and its ethos, “Embodiment of Progression,” in 2019. No matter the style or cut, each piece is rooted in making sense of the past for the present, or at least, what that means to them.
“Each collection is always based on feeling, emotions that we’re currently in,” Ken explains. They’re the concepts circling their minds in the present moment, whether they’re grounded in history or experience. “When you say ‘construction layers,’ you don’t think of clothing, [or] some people think of it as constructing layers of fabric, constructing materials. For us, it’s sort of like constructing ideas. This ideation, it’s a never-ending process on how to improve ourselves as a brand.”
The idea of the brand took form when the two met as college students in the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde industrial design program. They were drawn to the course for similar reasons. For Ken, it was a desire to get at “the idea of building things” that resonated. “I was playing a lot of Sims,” he laughs. He even wanted to take architecture at first, but industrial design promised more pathways. “I could really incorporate it into anything.”
On the other hand, CP had always been a child immersed in art and design, but he was more interested in understanding the inner workings of things. “I feel like it’s pretty inherent for me as a person,” he says, smiling up at a childhood memory. “I remember taking apart toys before. My parents would get mad at me.”
For both, the fall into fashion was unplanned. Their interests had suddenly shifted, but they found that the design processes they were learning could relate to clothing. Freshly exposed to “the culture of ukay” at the time, Ken was thinking through all these different frustrations in the menswear he had access to. “When you looked at something like, for example, a trucker jacket that really looked good silhouette-wise, but at the back, it’s like this cheesy embroidery,” he says. “[CP and I] both talked about it lang one day, and we wanted the same thing.” That was to start up a brand in their own style, and with their shared values: quality, craftsmanship, and using materials in their most natural forms.
“It was just that simple,” Ken says. They wouldn’t even have called each other friends then, but found comfort in someone who shared the same ideas. “Before we even started the brand, CP and I sort of sat down and talked to each other about, ‘Is this something we really want? Kasi bro, I’m here for the long game. What about you?’”
From there, it was more about editing down their aesthetics to one shared design language. At one time, they were at opposite ends of a spectrum, with Ken leaning toward streetwear and CP toward traditional suiting. But establishing their ethos early on in the conception of the brand allowed their sensibilities a compromise. “I feel like, now, our heads kind of melted into one,” CP says. And it shows in the easy, relaxed separates that would only take their form in technical tailoring and thoughtful flourishes, elements seen in their early collections to now.
The recurring shapes work up to an archive that expresses the full breadth of their grammar: diagonal button-fronts, notched collars, and patchwork waistcoats in natural fabrics, hand-dyed in their custom palette. They’re rooted in existing garments, but reimagined with detail that opens up a plethora of ways to wear.
There are also the cross-references in time, based on building on the ideas in their archive but also in finding inspiration in the past. The jeans they made in collaboration with Levi’s, for example, were inspired by photos of miners from the 1900s, their 501 jeans coated with patina. Ken and CP’s interpretation was a ruching at the pant legs and experiments in rust dyeing. “We found it really amazing,” Ken explains, “Each piece had its own character depending on the wearer.”
With every release, the designers aim to think broad-picture; these pieces aren’t only tailored to the present moment. Ken likes to imagine their wearer 10 years from now, holding what would be an archival garment in their hands and thinking, “This is the piece I still want to wear.”
Right now, what’s top of mind are Dutch fisherman jackets, antique kiss-lock clasps, leather, and a desire to incorporate more colors, prints, and textures in their collections. Further down the line, they’d like to explore developing their own denim. But Ken and CP don’t feel held down by the weight of these ideas, nor by time. If anything, they’re driven by it.
“I think, in a way, we also see the brand as like an extension of ourselves, some sort of reflection of how our tastes and mindsets grow,” CP shares. At range, the gestures and forms in their archive add up to a visual narrative of how ideas build and how tomorrow moves.
“Creation plays a really huge part in the brand. I think selling comes second,” Ken reflects. “The first should be about telling stories.”
By CHELSEA SARABIA. Photographs by BORGY ANGELES. Styling by ANZ HIZON. Makeup: Slo Lopez. Model: Sunil of Mercator. Executive Producer: Anz Hizon. Producer: Julian Rodriguez. Photographer’s Assistant: Karl Mariano, Pao Mendoza. Shot on location at Sine Pop.
