Mich Dulce | Nagsasalitang Ulo

Mich Dulce’s work originates in autobiography, but inevitably the self resists containment; it fractures, disperses, and becomes porous. What begins as introspection inevitably unravels into a confrontation with inherited scripts; colonial legacies that still choreograph the body, the gaze, the self, and even the very hand that crafts. Having trained with the Queen’s milliner and refined her practice at Maison Michel Paris, Dulce absorbed the exacting grammar of European haute millinery, a lineage consecrated in the canon of craft histories.

Yet mastery alone is never enough. In her inaugural year as mentor for the Chanel and The King’s Foundation Métiers d’Art Millinery Fellowship, Dulce reached the limits of that canon. Inside a field premised on European heritage, her very presence unsettled its borders, provoking questions: What does it mean to stand within this tradition while carrying another culture’s inheritance? How might Filipino identity press itself into the seams of millinery’s exalted order?

It is within this fissure that Nagsasalitang Ulo takes shape. Here, Dulce extends hat-making toward the sculptural, weaving Western codes of millinery into Filipino landscapes and memory. The results are both exquisite and insurgent: a salakot unraveled into scarlet grosgrain ribbons, erupting skyward; rice terraces transposed into a crown of tiered greens; the Ilocano gourd hat re-imagined in latex and buckram; the humble kubo reframed in buntal and crinoline, like a spectral Victorian petticoat. Each work becomes less a hat than a living archive, where craft refuses singular history and insists upon multiple, colliding inheritances.

As Marian Pastor Roces once described, the Filipino head is a site of “animated culture-making.” Dulce seizes that mantle, fashioning neither ethnographic revival nor Western mimicry, but a dazzling third space. Her improbable entanglements, at once technical bravura and ironic play; stage memory as a form of resistance. In doing so, she constructs rebellious temporalities, proposing how fragments and refusals may be refashioned into a national identity.

From this elsewhere, each hat becomes a talking head, a voice made material. Haute couture’s grammar is stretched until it articulates a new language, wild as abaca, sharp as wire, irreducibly her own.