The Pilita Corrales bootleg fan version hoodie inspired off her 'Philippine Love Songs' compilation album. This garment was also created after reading "Filipino Folk Foundry" by Hardworking Goodlooking to contribute to championing the research they have done regarding Filipino typography and script research.

Tropical Futures stumbled upon this graphic while visiting a music museum in Cebu, Philippines, Jose R. Gullas Halad Museum; a museum that pays tribute to the musical heritage of Cebu, Philippines. We hope this hoodie helps spread not only contemporary Filipino graphic aesthetic but also tropical graphic aesthetics.

The Eye on Design Guide to Glorious, Distorted, World of Typographical Tees

by Madeleine Morley for AIGA Eye on Design

Kristian Henson of Hardworking Goodlooking selects Philippine Love Songs by Tropical Futures Institute: “I’ve been following Tropical Futures Institute for a few years now. Chris Fussner, its founder, pretty much designed the perfect shirt. It has the right amount of nostalgia and the right amount of bootleg which really attracted me; it’s almost like a karaoke version of a song. It’s familiar but different, warped and synthesized. I immediately had to DM him when I saw it on IG.

“Lifted from an album cover, remixed to appear like a streetwear label or black metal tour shirt, the bright red calligraphy in combination with the warped san serifs from the liner notes on the long sleeve sum up everything I love in vernacular typography. Vernacular being ‘the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region,’ Philippine Love Songs channels the everyday graphic objects in the Filipino cultural sphere.  Whether you grew up in The Philippines or in the Diaspora, your parents raised you on certain albums in the background, you flipped through your tito’s dusty record collection, you heard this music DJ’ed during a fiesta or a wedding, and you might have even sang them yourself emotionally at KTV. If the vernacular is about a expressing a localized aesthetic/artistic accent, then of course it is very much tied to cultural identities, and I’m happy to see more unique voices represented in graphic design.





“I spoke with Chris Fussner so he could describe the project in his own words: ‘Initially a joke, playing on the power of words in creating identity, Tropical Futures Institute has morphed into a cultural project organizer producing everything from T-shirts to zine fests, art shows, and a residency in Cebu, Philippines. We love intersectionality so we do everything. This T-shirt is like a bait and switch for getting people aware of TFI. It’s our own cultural research in contributing specifically to post-tropicalia aesthetics.

‘We found a Pilita Corrales record sleeve in a music museum in Cebu, we also found out she is Cebuana which also sparked our curiosity since we are in the process of decentralizing culture in the Philippines. Around this time more awareness of tropical aesthetic is emerging: the book Filipino Folk Foundry drives this idea home and really catalyzed our idea into a product. We said we want to support the idea of creating alternative aesthetic ideals in what fonts may look like originating from a tropical setting.’”