Images of the land and sea characterize the story of Astella founder, Ria Lim, translating the said images onto her garments. The Palawan native takes more interest in riding the waves than sailing towards a destination, recognizing the freedom of the process rather than focusing on the final product, whether in creating or in becoming her own person.

Designing the brand

Astella is the clothing brand and brainchild of Industrial Design student Ria Lim. When she felt her plans for college were looking bleak, she decided to take a gap year. Though her initial venture idea was sustainable design and architecture, she felt unsure about how she would fit into that field. What she was sure of was that she wanted to design products that would influence people’s daily lives. So with a nudge from her mother, the founder of Tepiña, a brand of handwoven fabrics, and with a few sewing and patternmaking classes, Ria found her perfect fit in clothing design.

Minimalistic cuts, printed with repetitions of the recurring symbols in Ria’s story, are what embody Astella’s aesthetic. The brand’s first collection serves as the first chapter, which featured images of origami and basic geometric shapes, echoing the clean lines and geometry observed in Ria’s art deco style home in Manila, where she spent the beginning of her gap year. The second collection was named “Birds, Bees, Flowers, and the Sea”, which took patterns from the more organic forms that lived around her hometown in Palawan, where she spent a few months towards her gap year’s end. A collection of black and white sea creatures illustrated her transition into college. Pastel bugs and plants characterize her latest collection in which she experiments with embroidery; all while still keeping the brand’s personality.

The workshop

The name Astella was taken from a derivative of the French word atelier, meaning workshop. Ria’s initial vision was an idea space, a huge collaborative workshop with an environment conducive for creating and experimenting. Astella serves as Ria’s first creative endeavor towards her vision of a collaborative workshop. She plans to expand the brand’s consumer demographic, by bringing in more collaborators and creatives of different backgrounds to learn from and explore with.

Her ideal workshop would be a huge space where everyone can work on their own and also together, along with enough number of materials and equipment to cater to a wide range of mediums and experimentation so everyone can immediately and easily work on “the ideas they somehow stumble upon,” Lim explains.

A believer in the endless possibilities stemming from the little moments of serendipity, she quotes Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: “Great works are often born in the street corner of a restaurant’s revolving door.”

Almost done, never done

Besides designing for her brand, Ria also dabbles in furniture design. Her instagram dedicated to her other creative work is peculiarly named @almostdoneneverdone. Upon asking her why, she reveals that “almost done, never done” could be a description of her creative process.

The 20-year-old is not exempted from the frustration all creatives endure; her habit of being just “almost done” with projects admittedly bothered her but she then looked at it from a different angle and decided to always be “almost done, yet never done.”

“I’m going to keep going at the process. I don’t like seeing it as linear, start and finish. I’d like it to keep going in a circle, start something and keep going. It’ll be like I’m always almost done, wherein my goal is to make something good, but it won’t end there,” she said.

Back into the revolving door

Where it ends is indefinite. For Ria, the intimidating haze of the future, although scary, can also be comforting. She averts her eyes from the foggy horizon and instead focuses on the path she is on now, open to what is to come and to take it as it is.

In terms of now, the budding workshop owner has recently taken on the endeavor of owning a space in Escolta’s HUB: Make Lab in collaboration with some of her friends, selling their own creative work at one of Manila’s hippest art districts, open from Tuesdays to Sundays. The space was offered to her after a chat with the baristas at the cafe she frequented in Escolta, in the middle of one of her spontaneous solo adventures around Binondo. After the slump she felt like she was in after finishing Astella’s latest collection, the opportunity presented itself as a serendipitous moment.

She goes back into the revolving door, working towards wherever it will lead her to next.

Photos by Mac Ypon