Between a seasonal sojourn, Jo Ann Bitagcol lets nature show her the way.
A predicament greeted Jo Ann Bitagcol the moment she arrived in Hokkaido.
Japan’s northernmost prefecture is touted as the “Aspen of Asia,” where wintertime sees travellers skiing on the slopes or warming up in hot springs. Snow, fine like powder, descends from November to May, and when the Vogue team, including Jo Ann, makes the journey in March, they fall into the thick of it.
Jo Ann had never gone to this island despite being a frequent visitor of Japan. She anticipated a drop in temperature and weather conditions akin to Tokyo’s, a city she stayed in just a few months prior to welcome the new year. A busy schedule left her unable to research more on the location, and she pictured Hokkaido’s sprawling landscapes to be accompanied by cool breezes offset by sunshine in the day, and a veil of chilly air descending by night. What she hadn’t prepared for was a region blanketed in pure white, a temperature of negative four degrees Celsius. “Oh, snow everywhere!” she thought in the moment, pleasantly surprised. “Why not?”
Months later, Jo Ann recalls the rest of the tale between fits of laughter. She remembers how, during their fitting a day before the shoot, she finally approached Vogue Philippines deputy editor Pam Quinoñes to say, “Pam, I have an issue.” It turns out, all the model, photographer, and designer had packed for the trip was one jacket and a single thermal layer. For someone born and raised in a corner of the world with a year-long summer, she knew that it was impossible to brave the cold on her own. “Because I’m a tropical girl, being in a snowy place, that was just the challenge. Pero we delivered, we conquered, thanks to the entire team.”
The shoot marks Jo Ann’s first out-of-country production in years, the last one so long ago that she can barely call it to mind. “I felt young again,” laughs the 47-year-old, recounting the shoot. “It was a breakthrough, another milestone at this stage of my life, [that] you’re still highlighting the model aspect of me, which I am grateful for.”
Her sentiments register as a revelation, especially when it clicks that next year is her 30th working in fashion. The seed of her journey was planted in 1996 in a panciteria in Malolos, the city in Bulacan not too far off Marilao where she worked as a cotton mill factory worker in 1994, right after she graduated high school. To this day, Jo Ann’s origin story is often passed around like a legend: while out for lunch with a friend, the boyish, languid figure of the then-18-year-old caught the eyes of designer Peter Lim, makeup artist Jay Lozada, and director Jeffrey Jeturian, who happened to be dining at a nearby table. At the time, the teenager had just resigned from her post at the cotton mills, and was asking for help from a high school friend to apply to a fast food chain so she could simultaneously attend college. “This was the reason we were in the panciteria,” she remembers. “We were planning my future, but the universe had other plans for me… three fairy godmothers brought me to the fashion industry instead.”
Over in Hokkaido, she experiences the craft anew. Describing the opportunity as unexpected, she explains that it’s “because I didn’t do this when I was a model. And then now, parang, I’m being rewarded with these opportunities. I’m just blessed and grateful.”
The lavish comforts of the trip felt novel for Jo Ann, who experienced firsthand the hospitality of the Japanese. “I didn’t know it was super luxe,” she thinks out loud. “I had fun. And then also meeting The Luxe Nomad and collaborating with them as well. They were so nice, so warm, making sure that we’re well-fed and taken care of. I felt like a queen.”
She recalls moments between layouts, when the Vogue team would hurry to cover her in jackets, blankets, and heat packs to keep her warm. Chinese photographer Chienyun Zhang shoots Jo Ann against Hokkaido’s cool oasis; behind her lens, Jo Ann’s effervescent personality fizzles, and she transforms into a curious but solemn explorer. She is engulfed by the enormity of her surroundings, pausing to catch her distorted reflection on the ripples of a pool, savoring a moment of solitude while knee-deep in fine ice flakes, or looking pensively while an entire forest stands tall behind her.
There’s poetry embedded in each image. There is a delicacy to each captured element, from the fallen branch of flowers both budding and bloomed, down to the hand that brushes magenta on Jo Ann’s cheeks to accentuate the body’s response to the cold. It is a softness so distinct, so considered, and so intimately female.
It’s a vision brought to life by an all-women and all-Asian team composed of Zhang, Bitagcol, and Quiñones, alongside Japanese hair and makeup artist Mao Dooley and Filipino fashion stylist Leanne Ledesma. “The shoot for me was in a way an homage to Avedon’s legendary shoot with Versuschka and Polly Mellen in Hokkaido and other parts of Japan, but our story is told through Asian eyes,” narrates Pam, who conceptualized the story. Jo Ann, noting the team’s chemistry, adds, “I saw a strong voice for us Asians.”
In the documentary In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye, Mellen, the late Vogue fashion editor, chronicles the machinations behind “The Great Fur Caravan,” which she styled and Richard Avedon photographed in Japan. It was Mellen’s first assignment from then-editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland upon coming on board the magazine, and she famously travelled with 15 pieces of luggage bursting with garments. “We were there for five weeks. I mean, how fast are sittings done today, three days?” she asks cheekily. “It was the most expensive trip ever done at Vogue and never will happen again.”
True enough, Mellen was right. The Vogue Philippines shoot lasted four days, and while the team’s total luggage count matched Mellen’s at 15, it wasn’t all stuffed with clothes. Apart from the location, what Pam and Leanne’s tandem carried over most prominently from Mellen’s shoot to theirs was a storied wardrobe. Jo Ann was garbed in shapely forms by Japanese designers like Rei Kawakubo, but also in textural works of Filipino designers Joey Samson and Dennis Lustico, who happen to be longtime friends of the fashion multihyphenate. “You don’t really feel the difference [between who designed what] anymore, because we have a lot of great, great designers which are globally appealing as well. Walang hierarchy. Everything is just equally good,” she shares.
“I feel the world is… here lang,” Jo Ann continues, hand reaching out in front of her face, fist closing around air. “It’s just there,” she says, laughing. “It’s not so far anymore.”
A designer herself, Jo Ann’s artistic explorations have long stretched beyond modeling, though still in the sartorial realm. After spending years in front of the camera, she eventually made the pivot to photography. Later on, an opportunity came to document Filipino garments and accessories for the book Fashionable Filipinas at the invitation of co-authors scenographer Gino Gonzales and educator Mark Lewis Higgins, who she had worked with before. Owen C. Maddela, who penned an earlier feature of Jo Ann for Vogue, writes that by the time the book was published and distributed in 2015, “Jo Ann had amassed a collection of unpublished photographs that would become the nucleus of her future explorations of the intersection of art and fashion.”
These images were sold as prints and given second lives as trompe l’oeil scarves, shirts, dresses, robes, skirts, and trousers all housed under the Bitagcol brand. The designer’s successes abounded in recent years, and this outpouring of support for her creations sometimes still overwhelms her. In 2024 alone, she established an atelier in Poblacion, launched a pop-up shop in Rockwell’s PowerPlant mall, and showcased a collection on the runway of Bench Fashion Week.
That she is able to wear many hats is a blessing for her. Jo Ann is cognizant of the ways her creative endeavors feed into one another, whether intentionally or subconsciously, and attributes the synergy between these multiplicities to a solid internal foundation. “As long as you know who you are, your core values, then you can adapt anywhere you go,” she intimates. “Be it a photographer, be it a model… dati factory worker ako, you know. I make it a point that I deliver with grace and passion.”
Her grit may be quiet, but its impact certainly reverberates. “Jo Ann is a perfect example of a trifecta; she excels in all her endeavors,” says Ivar Aseron, a fellow fashion designer and one of Jo Ann’s dearest friends. “She has made an indelible impact in every field she has ventured into. As a young designer many years ago, I dreamed of her donning my creations on the runway, and that dream came true many times. She has also photographed me for magazine features, and I’m proud to own several of her beautifully designed pieces.”
Days after our call and two months removed from Hokkaido, Jo Ann is swept up in a flurry of meetings, client appointments, and production runs. Yet she finds time to send a text message of her reflections, having found a pocket of quiet to gather her thoughts on what the shoot meant to her: a healing, therapeutic getaway, surrounded by pure energy from nature (the lake, woods, and snow), and the company of great women from all over the globe.
“For every layout, when asked to move, sort of in a dance form, I felt like I was one with nature, the wind weaving gentleness as I moved my arms, receiving blessings and healing from Mother Earth and other forces,” she reminisces. “It was wonderful.”
By TICIA ALMAZAN. Photographs by CHIENYUN ZHANG. Styling by PAM QUIÑONES assisted by LEANNE LEDESMA. Special thanks to THE LUXE NOMAD. Model: Jo Ann Bitagcol. Hair and Makeup: Mao Dooley. Producer: Anz Hizon. Fashion Associate: Neil de Guzman. Fashion Assistants: Jinki Naomatsu, Jermainne Lagura, and Jia Torrato. Photographer’s Assistants: Yaimin Kang and Jules Dean. Videographer: Quinn Murphy. Production Associates: Rhyle Panozzo and Aless Rances. Special thanks to Cebu Pacific Air.
