Toronto-born Filipino designer Xylk Lorena releases his latest collection, a take on the iconic Birkin bag
By Shekinah Natan
Who would’ve thought that wearing grocery bags as a stylish accessory would be all the rage within the past two years? Fashion brand XYLK, named after its founder Xylk (pronounced silk) Lorena, is responsible for the new norm.
Lorena is a Filipino-Canadian designer who immigrated to Toronto in 2003. The brand was able to transform the everyday bag into a fashion statement, with collaborations with fellow Canadian creatives such as designer and creative director for Daniel Caesar Sean Brown, Canadian filmmaker and award-winning video director Director X, freelance stylist Sara Vee and treasured ice cream business, Ruru Baked. The brand has dropped multiple versions of the grocery bag for this collection, drawing inspiration from pop culture icons Paris Hilton, The Office, WWE, Nigo and 2000s basketball to name a few.
Before the creation of their most well-known product, XYLK got its start with t-shirts. Launching a shirt collection titled “Bboys Don’t Drive,” which was inspired by Frank Ocean’s label and magazine, “Boys Don’t Cry.” Similarly to Ocean, the brand challenged toxic masculinity within “car boy” culture, with the shirts featuring images of Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Mercedes’. The first “B” represents Bleecker Street, the street Lorena grew up on and a space that houses a lot of history with breakdancing and B-boying. The collection caught the attention of multiple websites and magazines such as NSS Magazine, Yohomo and Complex.
Anyone that’s been following XYLK for any period of time would know that one of Lorena’s biggest inspirations is his culture. XYLK has released many products in tribute to the Philippines, the first one being the ‘Bahay’ Bag” in collaboration with Filipino-Iranian creative Keavan Yazdani’s brand Joaquina World. “Bahay” means home in Tagalog, the main language spoken in the Philippines. The bag came with a copy of the “‘Bahay’ Booklet”, and similarly to the bag, the booklet consisted of photos depicting the landscape of the Philippines and the beauty of the Filipino way of life. This booklet predates XYLK’s lookbook included in the brand’s first clothing collection entitled, “LiFE DESiGN.”
Designed and made in Manila, the city where Lorena is from, the brand worked closely with its workers in the production process, as seen on their Instagram. The clothing line offers hats, shirts, pants and shorts in three colourways: midnight, coral and petal. All clothing items bore their emblematic swirl, known as the LD (standing for Life Design) petal.
XYLK would print an entire lookbook using the same material as its clothes as a better way to share its vision. The lookbook contained a variety of images of the Philippines and the people encountered throughout their travels in the country, along with logos and designs used in the collection. XYLK would go on to print out tapestries of Filipinos of varying ages and walks of life wearing their LD petal chain. Through LiFE DESiGN, XYLK was able to bring the east to the west, establishing roots for future Filipino creatives in the fashion and streetwear industry. Being able to set up shop in ComplexCon 2021 and now in 2022 as well, offering their iconic grocery bag in multiple designs. You might’ve seen them at Paris Men’s Fashion Week and most recently at the luxury clothing store, CNTRBND Toronto, where they held their most recent pop-up thus far.
On Oct. 7, 2022, XYLK dropped another collection of their iconic grocery bags titled “Expensive Groceries Bag.” The bags feature an image of the Hermes Birkin on a white background, displaying all four sides of the bag, including the bottom. Each side of the Birkin is shown on the corresponding side of the grocery bag, The collection consists of six colourways: Navy, Pink, Rustic Black, Emerald, Cognac and Himalayan, bearing the same names as its Birkin counterparts. On the XYLK website, each colourway carries a different expression, referencing a rich neighbourhood within Toronto: “Bridal Path, The Customer is Always Right! Pink,” “Forest Hill, Do You Live Around Here? Green,” “Gentrified Bleecker Black,” “Rosedale, Can I Talk to Your Manager? Brown,” “Yorkdale Do You Know Who My Father Is? (Himalayan)” and lastly “Yorkville, I’m Calling Security Blue.” Carrying a condescending tone, the infamous expressions are often associated with the rich, privileged and white social circles, the main demographic of these areas. In incorporating these alternative colourway titles, XYLK is poking fun at and mocking these wealthy neighbourhoods, one of them even giving another shoutout to Bleecker St.
XYLK “Expensive Grocery Bag” in the colourway, “Yorkdale, Do You Know Who My Father Is? (Himalayan)” (XYLK Shopify)
This is a major theme with this release: to point out the absurdity and ridiculousness of a life of luxury. The brand held a pop-up shop at Yorkville and customers who purchased the new collection received the bag in a white box featuring an image of an orange square, imitating the iconic Hermes packaging.
On the bottom of the bag and on the side of the box is text that reads, “GROCERIES COST AS MUCH AS THIS BAG.” Named after actress and singer Jane Birkin, the Birkin Bag ranges, “anywhere from $9,000 to half a million dollars” according to Business Insider and the world’s most expensive bag being the Hermes Himalayan Birkin bag, one of the bags included in XYLK’s collection, selling for $500,000.
Birkin bags are known to be the ultimate status symbol, a signifier of wealth, sought out and collected by celebrities such as Victoria Beckham, Kim Kardashian, Heart Evangelista and Jamie Chua, the latter notably owns the largest collection of Hermes bags with over 200 bags. To most, spending thousands of dollars on a single bag is completely irrational when you consider the cost of living in a city like Toronto.
With the text on the product and the packaging, XYLK attempts to highlight the realities of low-income neighbourhoods and the disparities found within Toronto. Half of the neighbourhoods mentioned on the website rank as the top three most expensive neighbourhoods in Toronto, as claimed by Toronto realtor and chartered accountant Scott Ingram. Houses are sold on average from $ 3.9 million to $ 5.1 million. As inflation rises, this increases food costs as well as the cost of living, according to the Toronto Star.
Canada’s Food Price Report predicts that “the average Canadian family of four will pay an extra $966 for food in 2022, for a total annual grocery bill of $14,767.” That would be on average $1,230.58 a month. In 2019, Toronto Public Health reported that food insecurity affects almost 1 in 5 Toronto households and that “households that rely on social assistance programs such as Ontario Works do not have enough money to afford basic living expenses including food.” Food insecurity is a direct cause of poor physical and mental health, raising a huge question on the affordability of groceries and why and how they have become too costly that people are unable to provide for themselves and their families.
It’s an understatement to say that the success of XYLK and Lorena’s work has been nothing short of inspirational, as cliche as it sounds. In an Instagram post, Lorena writes, “Every time I get tagged on a grocery bag from a different country it gives me indescribable joy and confidence boost to keep doing what I’m doing.”
“That priceless feeling y’all give me through the grocery bags I want to share with kids that look like me,” he writes.
Regardless of the progress the fashion industry has made in attempting to showcase different voices and cultures of marginalized communities, there is a significant lack of Southeast Asian representation. Based on issues such as colorism, Filipinos and other Southeast Asian designers still struggle to be acknowledged and taken seriously. Despite the many accomplishments and feats this brand has been able to achieve, Lorena never failed to represent his culture and upbringing. With the experience of growing up in the Philippines to immigrating to Canada, two arguably completely opposite places, Lorena was able to create a brand that fuses streetwear, fashion and pop culture, with community, representation and activism.
