“HURRY up, son! We have to get going!” the 75-year-old provincial governor said.
Stepping into the hallway, she examined herself in the mirror. She wore an oversized Prada Re-Nylon hooded jacket ($2,450), artfully layered over a crisp, minimalist Prada cotton T-shirt ($995). Resting flush against her collarbone, the iconic inverted-triangle metal logo caught the ambient light — a subtle, shimmering badge of sartorial status.
“Just a minute, Nanay. I can’t decide what to wear!” her son, the 52-year-old vice governor, shouted from inside the walk-in closet.
“Just grab what you can, and let’s go,” she said.
He emerged in a head-turning Balmain tracksuit ($2,150) dripping in the house’s iconic, high-contrast monogram pattern. He grounded the look in sleek designer sneakers from the On x Loewe collaboration ($450). On his crown was a cap from Happy Jewelers, a California-based boutique specializing in high-end diamond pieces and luxury watches.
“How do I look?” he asked his mother.
“That’ll do,” she said. “Come on, the rescue trucks are here.”
Mother and son weren’t going to a high-society pickleball event. They were off to inspect heavily flooded areas of their province that had been inundated by severe monsoon rains. Their itinerary included a dam, whose floodgates were clogged by uprooted trees and debris, a flood retention wall that was breached, and several towns where displaced residents took shelter in evacuation centers.
Later, the governor called into a TV network, telling residents to pray — and not to rely entirely on the government for help.
“You cannot rely solely on the government because there are so many of us,” she said in Filipino. ”You need to have a plan to keep your family safe.”
Elsewhere in the province, the mayor of the provincial capital was spotted making rounds through the capital’s waterlogged streets, turning disaster response into a front-row runway moment. While handing out relief packages, she was decked out in a quintessential Burberry Icon Stripe Zip-Up Jacket ($1,350) paired seamlessly with sleek, silhouette-sculpting Calvin Klein Performance High-Waisted Athletic Leggings ($75).
In another province to the southeast, a less sartorially notable mayor said residents in his water-logged town should have built two-story houses on their own to cope with the floods.
“Our agreement here was that they would build the houses themselves and make them two-story structures.... They have the money for that anyway,” he said, adding that the local government could not afford to shoulder housing costs for the thousands of affected families.
As outlandish as these stories may seem (OK, the dialogue at the top was imagined), they are based on truth.
The governor and her son, the vice governor, did in fact visit flooded areas and evacuation centers garbed in luxury designer clothes, as did the mayor from a neighboring province to the south. None of them thought anything about showing up in garments that the impoverished flood survivors — drenched and muddy, physically exhausted, and heavy with grief and shock as their homes were washed away — could ever afford, even after toiling for more than a year.
Nor did they think there was anything wrong about victim-blaming flood survivors who were probably at the lowest point in their lives.
Where do we get such insensitive leaders? And why do we keep voting them and their relatives into office? The governor in question has been in power in her province for 16 years, swapping places with her son when term limits kicked in, then trading places again when she became eligible for the top post.
Asked by a news channel about the torrent of online criticism that rained on her and her son, the governor said there was nothing she could do about how some people thought, and said she is not a frivolous or ostentatious person. She merely grabbed what was available to wear that day — and it wasn’t all that expensive. Under repeated questioning, she finally managed a “sorry” for people who thought they had done something wrong — and thanked them for the “wake-up call.”
Burberry in the rain? Groundbreaking.