Paris-trained Cambodian fashion designer Romyda Keth (Photo: www.rouge.com.sg)Click here to learn more about Romyda's life
Noted Cambodian designer to launch collection in Manila
06/15/2007
Inquirer (Manila, The Philippines)
MANILA, Philippines -- I’m the only one left. My whole family killed, my sisters and parents,” the hotel driver said as we came up the driveway of Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh.
It was an odd way to break the ice, but what initially comes to mind among first-time visitors to Cambodia, like we were, is “The Killing Fields”—the movie and the recent history of this Southeast Asian neighbor. We asked our driver if he was around during the civil war in the ’70s and the ignominious Pol Pot regime which saw about three million people killed.
He was 13 years old then, he said. We would later learn that his fate was fairly common among residents of Phnom Penh. People lost families to the genocidal regime that wiped out a quarter of the population, mostly of the educated class.
Yet Cambodia today is not a sad place; far from it. While it’s not as bustling as Metro Manila—not yet—it is experiencing an economic boom. Former Budget Secretary Ben Diokno, whom we ran into at the Raffles (he was in Cambodia on a consulting job), said Cambodia is the fastest growing economy in the region.
“On the fast track” is how World Bank describes the Cambodian economy, fueled as it is by garment exports, tourism and agricultural production. Its garment industry is apparently surviving the China onslaught.
This brings us to why we were in Phnom Penh in the first place—to look into the fashion collection of Paris-trained Cambodian designer Romyda Keth. (A few Cambodian designers are making inroads in New York.) Apart from her beautiful atelier/store in Phnom Penh, Keth already has stores called Ambre in Tokyo (Roponggi), London, Paris, Ho Chi Minh and in a high-end resort in Africa.
Keth’s atelier in a leafy neighborhood in Phnom Penh is a lovely two-story colonial house she turned into a showroom. The beauty of Phnom Penh is that, like Ho Chi Minh, it has a few houses and government buildings that survive from the country’s French colonial years. They’re like isolated pieces of old Europe transported to the here and now, co-existing—although not fully blending—with aging shophouses, new fancy buildings with bright blue glass windows purveying hybrid architecture, and well-paved roads (Phnom Penh has a better road network than Metro Manila) that have equal numbers of motorbikes and cars.
On a hot summer day, Phnom Penh neighborhoods can be pretty laidback. It was to this comfort zone that Keth returned as a wife and mother after growing up in Paris.
Born to diplomat parents (her mother is Cambodia’s ambassador to Beijing and her father is the ambassador to Unesco), she and her family left Cambodia when she was only seven. After years in Prague, they moved to Paris in the early ’70s. There she went to the Paris School of Fine Arts and, later, to the Esmod School of Fashion Design.
After only two years at Esmod, she accepted a designing job at Macy’s. Not long after this, she began showing her own collections in a small boutique in Paris and developing a good clientele, including actress Carole Bouquet, the former wife of French actor Gerard Depardieu.
In 1994, her husband, a biologist, prodded her to return to and live in Cambodia. The couple and their four children (now aged 18 to 5) resettled in Phnom Penh where Keth took some time to adjust. She continued exporting her clothes to her Paris clientele, but before long, she discovered the native home industries of embroidery and silk weaving. Cambodian silk and embroidery then became the defining elements of her design.
Keth’s designs are chic, as chic as her atelier. They’re not costumes. They’re contemporary, and a few, such as her winter coats with fabric-strip borders, offer cutting-edge designs. It’s obvious she speaks through fabrics and colors, the way she does in her shop.
Tantalizing colors
Her atelier has graceful wrought-iron windows, a fluid stairway, and rooms in colors that are so bold they put you in various moods as you move from one to the other. Her colors stimulate, like spices. For instance, her black clothes are in a fuchsia room. On the second floor, the black and grey clothes are in a purple room. Another room is painted in shades of purple to serve as backdrop for red-to-hot pink clothes.
Like the walls of her atelier, her clothes follow a stimulating palette—from blacks and greys, to purple and lilac, to saffron and fuchsias and pinks. These are tantalizing colors to any woman.
Her silhouettes are trendy but wearable—lots of bubble skirts or flare, pencil skirts or dress coats. She uses appliqués (perfect on those colorful geometrics), embroidery, judicious beadwork, fabric strips.
Her clear advantage over Filipino designers is her access to fabrics: Cambodian silks, organza, and Korean cotton and other fabric blends.
She loves mixing colors and fabrics. “Today’s women are so busy in their careers and with their children that they forget to be glamorous, to be women, to be pretty,” Keth told us.
She designs mini collections every week—a clear indication of a growing clientele in Phnom Penh, composed mostly of expatriates and a growing middle class. This should easily draw the envy of Manila designers.
Another enviable thing about Cambodian fashion is the existence of weaving villages. Our car crossed the Mekong River by ferry boat to reach Koh Daich, a village of weavers. There we saw women hunched before their looms, weaving silk in jewel colors—fuchsia and pink in one house, lilac in another, aqua in still another.
Ramon Bilbao snapped up the fabrics and wanted to bring home those huge concrete jars (septic tanks, it turned out) if only he could.
Hiraya Gallery’s Didi Dee arranged our trip on the invitation of another (ex)gallery owner and businessman, Michael Adams, our friend from the Pinaglabanan Gallery years of the ’80s. Michael and his wife Janet are frequent visitors to Phnom Penh, looking into the orphanages there. It was on one of these trips that they walked into Ambre, Keth’s store, and loved her clothes.
Michael and Janet will open a store of Keth’s collections in Makati and launch it in November this year.
It was an odd way to break the ice, but what initially comes to mind among first-time visitors to Cambodia, like we were, is “The Killing Fields”—the movie and the recent history of this Southeast Asian neighbor. We asked our driver if he was around during the civil war in the ’70s and the ignominious Pol Pot regime which saw about three million people killed.
He was 13 years old then, he said. We would later learn that his fate was fairly common among residents of Phnom Penh. People lost families to the genocidal regime that wiped out a quarter of the population, mostly of the educated class.
Yet Cambodia today is not a sad place; far from it. While it’s not as bustling as Metro Manila—not yet—it is experiencing an economic boom. Former Budget Secretary Ben Diokno, whom we ran into at the Raffles (he was in Cambodia on a consulting job), said Cambodia is the fastest growing economy in the region.
“On the fast track” is how World Bank describes the Cambodian economy, fueled as it is by garment exports, tourism and agricultural production. Its garment industry is apparently surviving the China onslaught.
This brings us to why we were in Phnom Penh in the first place—to look into the fashion collection of Paris-trained Cambodian designer Romyda Keth. (A few Cambodian designers are making inroads in New York.) Apart from her beautiful atelier/store in Phnom Penh, Keth already has stores called Ambre in Tokyo (Roponggi), London, Paris, Ho Chi Minh and in a high-end resort in Africa.
Keth’s atelier in a leafy neighborhood in Phnom Penh is a lovely two-story colonial house she turned into a showroom. The beauty of Phnom Penh is that, like Ho Chi Minh, it has a few houses and government buildings that survive from the country’s French colonial years. They’re like isolated pieces of old Europe transported to the here and now, co-existing—although not fully blending—with aging shophouses, new fancy buildings with bright blue glass windows purveying hybrid architecture, and well-paved roads (Phnom Penh has a better road network than Metro Manila) that have equal numbers of motorbikes and cars.
On a hot summer day, Phnom Penh neighborhoods can be pretty laidback. It was to this comfort zone that Keth returned as a wife and mother after growing up in Paris.
Born to diplomat parents (her mother is Cambodia’s ambassador to Beijing and her father is the ambassador to Unesco), she and her family left Cambodia when she was only seven. After years in Prague, they moved to Paris in the early ’70s. There she went to the Paris School of Fine Arts and, later, to the Esmod School of Fashion Design.
After only two years at Esmod, she accepted a designing job at Macy’s. Not long after this, she began showing her own collections in a small boutique in Paris and developing a good clientele, including actress Carole Bouquet, the former wife of French actor Gerard Depardieu.
In 1994, her husband, a biologist, prodded her to return to and live in Cambodia. The couple and their four children (now aged 18 to 5) resettled in Phnom Penh where Keth took some time to adjust. She continued exporting her clothes to her Paris clientele, but before long, she discovered the native home industries of embroidery and silk weaving. Cambodian silk and embroidery then became the defining elements of her design.
Keth’s designs are chic, as chic as her atelier. They’re not costumes. They’re contemporary, and a few, such as her winter coats with fabric-strip borders, offer cutting-edge designs. It’s obvious she speaks through fabrics and colors, the way she does in her shop.
Tantalizing colors
Her atelier has graceful wrought-iron windows, a fluid stairway, and rooms in colors that are so bold they put you in various moods as you move from one to the other. Her colors stimulate, like spices. For instance, her black clothes are in a fuchsia room. On the second floor, the black and grey clothes are in a purple room. Another room is painted in shades of purple to serve as backdrop for red-to-hot pink clothes.
Like the walls of her atelier, her clothes follow a stimulating palette—from blacks and greys, to purple and lilac, to saffron and fuchsias and pinks. These are tantalizing colors to any woman.
Her silhouettes are trendy but wearable—lots of bubble skirts or flare, pencil skirts or dress coats. She uses appliqués (perfect on those colorful geometrics), embroidery, judicious beadwork, fabric strips.
Her clear advantage over Filipino designers is her access to fabrics: Cambodian silks, organza, and Korean cotton and other fabric blends.
She loves mixing colors and fabrics. “Today’s women are so busy in their careers and with their children that they forget to be glamorous, to be women, to be pretty,” Keth told us.
She designs mini collections every week—a clear indication of a growing clientele in Phnom Penh, composed mostly of expatriates and a growing middle class. This should easily draw the envy of Manila designers.
Another enviable thing about Cambodian fashion is the existence of weaving villages. Our car crossed the Mekong River by ferry boat to reach Koh Daich, a village of weavers. There we saw women hunched before their looms, weaving silk in jewel colors—fuchsia and pink in one house, lilac in another, aqua in still another.
Ramon Bilbao snapped up the fabrics and wanted to bring home those huge concrete jars (septic tanks, it turned out) if only he could.
Hiraya Gallery’s Didi Dee arranged our trip on the invitation of another (ex)gallery owner and businessman, Michael Adams, our friend from the Pinaglabanan Gallery years of the ’80s. Michael and his wife Janet are frequent visitors to Phnom Penh, looking into the orphanages there. It was on one of these trips that they walked into Ambre, Keth’s store, and loved her clothes.
Michael and Janet will open a store of Keth’s collections in Makati and launch it in November this year.
4 comments:
Congratulation to Khmuy Srey
Romyda Keth !
A new Khmer-Star is borne ,bright
with a Khmer spirith.Thank you.
Khmer needs some of the origional crop like Ms. Keth. Someone never know what it was like to be in Pol Pot Regime. Most of us had suffered so much pain and agony from ah Bal Bye regime Khmer Rouge and true, we forgot who we really were and how we used to be. We were one fun, smart and fabulous people just like everybody else until you know..Just don't get me start it. Proud to see here in our land again Ms.Keth and thank you for coming back. We surely need more of people like yourself.
Congratulation!!!!!! Keep it up!!!
Yes, congrats indeed! Pls keep up the awesome work as im sure u will and hopefully u will also share ur knowledge, and train others to be just like you one day as well. Cheers and all the best!
Long live Khmer and her mighty kingdom!~
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