Matt Ortile - The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows Ive Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

A T F ILIPINO WEDDINGS, the grooms wear white. The classical attire for men is an undyed shirt, with sleeves up to the wrists and fine embroidery down the front. Its called a barong Tagalog, literally Tagalog clothing. Most versions are cut from pia, a sheer fabric woven from pineapple leaves; silk but make it tropical. Of course, the barong is not a grooms only option. For five centuries, since our country was first colonized by empires, men in the Philippines have also worn the suit and tieor, in the current Philippine parlance, the Americana.

Over the years, Ive amassed a collection of suits in different colors, fabrics, and patterns. A suit can work anywhere, anyhow: with a turtleneck at the office, with sneakers at a bar, with a bow tie at a wedding. Its also something of a sartorial feint. A crisp blazer signals to colleagues that, yes, I can absolutely lead this meeting, even hungover. A fresh suit gives my dates the impression I do have my life together, even though I could only afford an appetizer at dinner. Suits exude power. I wear Americana as armor.

So to take off a suit feels especially intimate. Whether in my bedroom or the bedrooms of other men, disrobing leaves me vulnerable, my body exposed without the eye-guiding seams of a well-tailored garment. But, just like armor, a suits component parts remain useful as separates. I once made good use of a tie and Theos bedposts, while Gareth knew exactly what to do with a leather belt. Equally romantic are the rituals of the thing. Stephen liked to fix my pocket squares, and Adam would take my jacket, drape it over my shoulders like a cape. He admired it, he once told me, my confidence when I wore a suit, how it made me untouchable.

Barong Tagalogs, in contrast, are translucent. Pia fabric is chiffony, like organza; all the better to catch a cool breeze in the Philippines humid climate in Southeast Asia. The garment evolved from precolonial clothing, as illustrated in the Manila Manuscript, a codex that dates to about 1590. It describes how local ethnic groups appeared to their Spanish colonizers. The manuscript says social status among natives was color-coded. For example, blue was the color of the nobility, while red was reserved for royalty.

I first saw these illustrations in a Wikipedia spiral about Filipino history. Id just finished college and moved to New York, feeling untethered, particularly from my homeland. So I was ecstatic to learn about the manuscript, to see how vivid the ink and paint were still, even half a millennium later, digitized in a library archive. Here were my ancestors, catalogued like animals, but gallant nonetheless, draped in their silks and wielding their swords. How proud they looked, armed with jewelry and dripping in gold, opulent.

That was stolen from us. The Spaniards turned our various tribes, rajahnates, and kingdoms into a single colony, an appendix to their far-reaching empire. They brought their weapons, their own customs and class systems, and enforced them for over three hundred years. Unverified legends say that, under Spanish rule, men below the ruling class were forbidden from tucking their shirts into their trousers or wearing anything with pockets. This edict prevented Filipinos from stealing goods or cloaking weapons. Their Filipino clothing affirmed their status as subjects without agency.

Theres no proof of such an imperial decree. Historians have not found any law in colonial Philippines that forbade men from tucking, as it were. And contemporary photographs exist of tucked Filipino men. Jos Rizal, a writer and our national hero, is often pictured with his shirt in his trousers, wearing European clothingincluding suit and tie. This Western dress came to be known as Americana when, after war with Spain, the United States took possession of the Philippines, where white men in power wore their suits and coats, roasting themselves in the equatorial sun.

But then again, lived experiences of discrimination dont always find proof in official documents or laws, often scrubbed or never recorded. Whatever the truth, I like the reports of how Filipinos responded, allegedly decorating their barongs with bright colorsnoble blue and royal redan homage to precolonial ancestors to protest the Spanish social order. Ive come to love this idea, redeeming Filipino clothing, the barong Tagalog as resistance.