Pink October this year is extra meaningful for me. I have been participating in this advocacy promoting breast cancer awareness since 2012, as a signature project of the Rotary Club of Downtown Davao (RCDD). But it is a bit more personal this year because my friend and sister, Susan Magno-Antepuesto, has just been diagnosed with breast cancer.
We started Pink Runway as part of Pink October last year. This idea came about because my friend, Atty. Pearl Jayagan-Turley, national program director for women of SM Cares, and I wanted something fun and innovative to showcase the beauty, strength, and resilience of breast cancer survivors. We asked another friend, Oca Casaysay, head of the Davao City Culture and Arts Office, who organized the famous Moda Mindanao, to be its creative director. Oca is also an honorary member of RCDD.
Pink Runway is not just about shining the light on breast cancer patients, survivors, and their advocates, it also showcases the creativity of our local fashion designers in promoting sustainable fashion.
Last year, Susan was one of three local designers featured. This year, we decided to just focus on her and her creations. Not only because of her recent breast cancer diagnosis, but because Susan has long been an advocate of sustainable fashion and she is known for her amazing upcycling skills.
Upcycling in fashion is the practice of taking existing clothing, textiles, or materials that might otherwise be thrown away and transforming them into new garments or accessories. Instead of breaking those materials down into raw fibers, upcycling preserves the original fabric and often its history, stitching it into something with equal or greater value.
It’s different from recycling because recycling often shreds or chemically breaks down materials to make new yarn or fiber. Upcycling keeps the material intact. You’re not erasing its past; you’re building on it. Old table napkins are sewn together to make a blouse. An heirloom handwoven table runner is transformed into a skirt. A jusi wedding gown from 40 years ago is remade as a modern Filipiniana top. The original object carries memory, and the new piece carries it forward.
In sustainable fashion, upcycling matters because it fights waste. The fashion industry produces enormous amounts of textile waste and uses huge quantities of water, energy, and chemicals. Upcycling diverts clothes from landfills, reduces demand for virgin materials, and often has a much smaller environmental footprint. It also pushes back against fast fashion’s throwaway logic — the idea that clothes are disposable and so, by extension, are people.
But upcycling is not just environmental. It’s creative and emotional. Every upcycled garment is one of a kind. It has scars, seams, patches, and stories. That’s why it fits naturally with the theme of rebirth and renewal, the theme of Susan’s collection.
Our Pink Runway models and muses are from BreastFriends Davao, a support group for breast cancer warriors and their caregivers. For them, upcycling mirrors what they do with their own lives — take what has been cut, treated, changed, and make something beautiful and new. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is discarded. The “damage” becomes part of the design.
Each piece of Susan’s creation, worn by breast cancer survivors on the runway, carries a collage of memory and survival. That is upcycling at its deepest — not just saving fabric, but honoring people. It says: This material has a history. This body has a history. And neither is finished yet.
I was seated with the group of BreastFriends during the Pink Runway and they served as the lively and loud cheering squad of the event. I saw how each model’s face lit up as she placed her hand above her heart and blew air kisses from the runway to her fellow survivors.
Later, the models shared that they felt seen, not just looked at. A spotlight can be a scalpel or a sunrise. It can expose someone, make them feel like a specimen, a pity case, a before-and-after photo. Or it can illuminate them — their face, their story, their scars, their style, their still-beating heart. For cancer survivors, the spotlight, when it’s done right, means the world is saying: We see you. Not just your diagnosis. You.
For some survivors, that is everything. Cancer can make you feel invisible in plain sight. Your body becomes a chart. Your days become medical appointments. Your identity shrinks to a stage and a grade. Then you step into a runway and in front of cameras and it becomes your turn to tell the truth about you and walk how you want. That is not vanity. That is agency. That is dignity. That is a survivor getting to define herself instead of being defined by a disease.
It also means representation. When a newly diagnosed person sees a survivor on a runway, — scarred, radiant, alive — something shifts. They think: Maybe I can get to Monday. Maybe I can get to next year. Maybe I can get to a life that still feels like mine. The spotlight doesn’t just honor the person standing in it. It sends a lifeline to someone watching from a hospital bed.
But it means community, too. Because no survivor stands alone under the light. Behind her are doctors, nurses, caregivers, partners, children, friends, neighbors, advocates, support groups, even strangers. The spotlight widens. It shines the light on the caregiver who never slept. The friend who sat beside you and held your hand through chemotherapy. The warrior who didn’t make it and is carried in memory. When we shine a light on survivors, we are really shining it on a whole web of love and solidarity. We are saying: this is not a solo journey. You are not walking alone.
That is why Pink October matters — and why it must be done honestly, not as a prop. It should be a witness. It should be a demand for mammograms, affordable treatment, paid leave, research, and caregiver support. It should be a promise that we will not look away.
For Susan, my designer friend, the spotlight meant she could take her diagnosis and turn it into design. She wore her old traje de boda thatshe remade into a blouseas she took her bow on the Pink Runway and said, without speaking: I am still here. I am still creating. I am not discarded. And all of us who had held a thread stood with her.
And the models who showcased Susan’s creations? Their scars are not flaws. They are seams. They are evidence of survival. They are beauty, upcycled. On the runway, reborn. ###