TERNOCON 2027 Opens Its 10-Year Milestone With First Mentoring Workshop in Clark
Fifteen emerging designers from across the Philippines begin their journey toward the fifth edition of the country’s premier terno-making convention and contest.
Words Bernadette Soriano
Photos courtesy of TERNOCON
August 19, 2026
Art by Nicole Vinco | Photos courtesy of TERNOCON
In Clark, Pampanga, the next generation of terno makers has begun its work.
For 4 days, 15 aspirants gathered at the Clark Events and Conference Center for the first mentoring-consultation workshop of TERNOCON 2027, the fifth edition of the terno-making convention and contest mounted by the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and Bench/Suyen Corporation.
Drawn from 52 applications, the cohort spans an unusually broad swath of the archipelago, from Laguna, Oriental Mindoro, Tarlac, Makati, and Taguig in Luzon. In Visayas, Cebu, Mandaue, Roxas, Silay, and Iloilo, and onward to Zamboanga City, Maguindanao del Norte, Davao de Oro, Iligan, and Koronadal in Mindanao.
Their TERNOCON journey unfolded through a week-long regional workshop and a day-long Zoom lecture with fashion designers and cultural figures Dr. Nicanor G. Tiongson, Len Cabili, and Gino Gonzales, whose sessions extended beyond the mechanics of design to situate the terno within the histories, ideas, and cultural questions that continue to animate Philippine dress.
The work now narrows to the closer business of mentorship, with fashion designer Inno Sotto, TERNOCON’s chief mentor since 2018, guiding the 15 aspirants alongside designers Josie Natori, Randy Ortiz, and Jojie Lloren, Gonzales, the program’s founding artistic director, and Ricardo Eric Cruz, its incumbent artistic director.
Across these consultations, the terno is treated not as a finished inheritance but as a practice still in flux: its construction honed under expert hands, its possibilities tested through experimentation, its place in contemporary life continually renegotiated.
Since its inception, TERNOCON has cultivated precisely this exchange—bringing emerging designers into conversation with established practitioners while folding scholarly inquiry into the same creative ambit.
The larger ambition is continuity: to keep the terno in circulation, its relevance renewed as each generation takes it up anew.
Preservation, then, resides as much in wearing and making as in remembering, with young designers carrying an inherited vocabulary forward even as they give it fresh form.
For its fifth edition, that lineage opens onto the natural world. “An Ode to Nature,” the theme of TERNOCON 2027, arrives alongside the program’s 10-year milestone—a decade over which the terno has found a wider public, its history and possibilities brought increasingly within the ken of younger generations.
The anniversary, fittingly, leaves one question hanging: what might those inheritors make of a garment already so deeply woven into the Filipino imagination?
The inaugural lock-in workshop is mounted in partnership with the Clark Development Corporation, City Government of Mabalacat, Department of Tourism Region III, Royce Hotel, and Victory Liner. The second follows on January 27–31, 2027, culminating in the final competition and cultural show on March 14.
At the project’s helm are the CCP Cultural Exchange Department and CCP Production Design and Technical Services Division, working in collaboration with the TERNOCON organizing team and Bench Ad & Promo team.
For further updates, visit the CCP website and follow the official social channels of CCP, the CCP Cultural Exchange Department, TERNOCON, and Bench.
