Inside Rafe New York’s Spring 2026 Merienda Shoot With Dawn Zulueta, Ayisha Lagdameo, and More

Captured in Forbes Park over tea, pancit, and conversation, Rafe New York’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection finds its perfect setting in an unscripted merienda.

Almost a decade since his last trip to the Philippines, New York-based designer Rafe Totengco returned home carrying no grand campaign blueprint, only a far more personal agenda: merienda with old friends and the comfort of a familiar abode. “Honestly, the whole thing started so casually,” he says. “I was in Manila for the first time in eight years, and Dawn suggested we get together for merienda and catch up.”

That Dawn is actress Dawn Zulueta, whom Totengco has known since the late 1980s. “I’ve known Dawn since 1987. Isn’t that crazy?” he says. “I used to dress her when she was just starting in show business. I used to make a lot of her clothes, and we’ve stayed friends ever since.”

The gathering, held at Zulueta’s mother-in-law’s home in Forbes Park, soon evolved into an impromptu portrait of Filipino femininity across generations. Zulueta invited her daughter, Ayisha Lagdameo, sister-in-law Tina Lagdameo, and friend Joanna Preysler Francisco. “Everyone was game,” Totengco recalls.

Then came a suggestion that changed the afternoon. “A day later, she was like, ‘You know, I was thinking about it. Would you like to shoot some of your bags while we’re having a merienda?'” Totengco says. “And I’m like, let me think about it. Yes!”

There was no elaborate set, no stylist, and no production crew. The women styled themselves, carrying pieces from Rafe New York’s upcoming Spring/Summer 2026 collection, including woven hobos, solihiya clutches, minaudières, and intricately embroidered evening bags. As Totengco puts it, “No big production, no overthinking, self-styled—just friends hanging out, catching up, laughing, eating, and posing with the bags in between conversations.”

Recognizing that the spontaneity of the afternoon deserved to be captured with equal care, Totengco enlisted photographer Paui Guevarra and videographer Alfonso Fajatin to document the gathering. “I didn’t want it to be super fashion-y,” he says. “I wanted it really just to be a very relaxed atmosphere.”

The resulting images surprised even him. “I saw some stills from the shoot, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re really kind of cute,'” he says. “They remind me of old Vogue photographs from the ’50s ladies having tea. There was something kind of charming about that.”

Inspired by the Daku Balay featured in Houses That Sugar Built, a coffee-table book about the grand sugar-era ancestral homes of Iloilo, Negros Occidental, and Pampanga, the collection drew from the era’s architecture and spirit of ambition. Around them, the women gathered over a spread of adobo flakes sandwiches, cheese pimiento sandwiches, chicken empanadas, pancit canton, biko, fresh mangoes, pomelos, and tea, turning the afternoon into a celebration of timeless friendship.

“It wasn’t a traditional campaign shoot,” Totengco says. “It was just me and my friends having merienda.”