No Gatekeeping, just Girlbossing
Ckaye,
Couture Rebel
she/her
August 6, 2025
by Andie Abad Santos
“Create with purpose. "
Ckaye arrives without the air of someone trying to impress, yet she’s impossible to overlook. The hair, the color choices, all deliberate without feeling staged. She doesn’t compete for attention, but when she speaks, the room shifts with her.
Her path to fashion wasn’t linear. She studied Mass Communications at Adamson University, a choice encouraged by her mother, but her real focus was always elsewhere. Fashion design was instinctive, something she would have pursued even if no one noticed. Her great-grandmother was a beloved seamstress, and from her came both the skill and the reverence for clothes as lasting objects. She refined her craft through formal training at SoFA and Galvez Atelier, but the foundation was laid in thrift stores and long nights with fashion archives, where she learned to see possibility in what others overlooked.
That instinct shaped a style where streetwear and editorial fashion meet. She gravitates toward strong silhouettes, experimental layering, and compositions that resist predictability. Her shoots blend studied proportion with moments of raw imperfection, producing images that feel lived-in rather than staged. She built her skills across roles at White Label Bridal and New Barbizon, learning that design is as much about making others shine as it is about personal vision.
Queerness runs through her work, not as a statement piece but as an unshakable part of her perspective. It allows her to create without deference to convention and informs her collaborations with other queer creatives. She’s drawn to underrepresented styles, as she believes that fashion is richer when more voices shape it.
“I think their strength lies in their unique perspective and narratives, honestly it’s so powerful because no one else can replicate that.”
Sustainability, for Ckaye, is practice over slogan. She reuses, reconstructs, and sources with care, treating garments as objects with lives before and after their time with a wearer. For her, value lies in creating better, not simply more. “A lot of ethical issues arise when you create solely for money. That purpose sets you apart from the many. I also believe that we don’t need more but rather we need better: Better ways of producing garments, better purposes, better timelines, better stories to tell,” she says.
Running her independent brand means wearing every hat, from design, production, and marketing, while navigating the realities of the business side. She has learned that patience and financial discipline are as critical as creativity. And in an industry obsessed with immediacy, she prefers the slow build, the chance to see what lasts.
Ckaye’s vision is steady: create work that holds its own, that feels as personal as it is universal. In that way, her patience may be her boldest choice yet.
