Yet Jerome’s fashionable works extend to far beyond wedding dresses, as he has created couture pieces that have graced runways both locally and abroad, garnered him significant critical acclaim, and, more recently, earned him a coveted place in the upcoming Malaysian International Fashion Awards (MIFA).

Originally set to work in Interior Design after graduating from UST, Jerome came upon fashion almost by accident. Attending a high school reunion, he hooked up with two other friends who were into design and decided to put together a small made-to-order shop in Binondo. When the shop eventually closed down, Jerome decided to work with the existing equipment instead of letting it go to waste, and he started a small shop of his own where he catered to mostly Chinese clients.

Because there were a limited number of fashion schools at the time, learning from scratch and having to figure things out the hard way (such as what kind of clothes suited certain body types) was Jerome’s only option. He made small successes with the wedding industry in 1998, which eventually grew to a full, fairly established business in weddings that has had, on occasion, up to six weddings a day on their calendar.

Jerome’s venture in couture, on the other hand, came in 1997, when he attended a class conducted by Inno Sotto at the College of St. Benilde. But it was after attending succeeding fashion design classes at PISF that Jerome met none other than Shanon Pamaong, who eventually put up the Fashion Institute of the Philippines and brought Jerome in to teach Fashion Illustration after he studied and graduated from FIP’s complete set of classes.

Jerome’s style is constantly changing and growing, which is something he believes to be necessary for any fashion designer. Style, for him, is influenced more immediately by emotions, but largely by the things he picks up in his many projects and personal research, as well as, conversely, the things that put limits on him (such as certain specifications for the contests he joins). As he explained to designer Albert King during his panel defense in an early stage of the MIFA, on how his background in wedding dresses didn’t necessarily overwhelm his MIFA designs: "As a designer, you have to grow. Whatever they throw at you, you have to be able to mold and incorporate with your style to create something that still reflects you but is something altogether new."

Jerome does, however, maintain an overall design philosophy that would seem to stem from his own background in sculpture and painting, which governs many of his processes in creating clothes. Simply that, "There is beauty in chaos; there is beauty in the random."

"When I make beaded wedding dresses, for example," Jerome explains, "there is a chaotic nature to the beading, but at the same time there is a storyline to it. It isn’t about just trying to fully bead the dresses, it’s about, for example, moving from a certain focal point to extend the design of the whole dress." This sense of chaotic beauty is also what Jerome is trying to achieve in his ten-piece collection for MIFA. Consisting of six casual clothes, three evening dresses, and one avant-garde piece, Jerome composes each dress as well as the collection on a whole on the theme of a particular kind of chaos: decay.

"I use a lot of earth-bound colors, because I have a preference for neutral colors," explains Jerome, who has always favored using neutral tones and playing with texture instead. "But in my avant-garde piece, for example, I tea-dyed the dress with clumps of leaves left in them to create a decayed effect. Parang nagbabatik. I also ladder edges of the evening wear to add to the frayed and decaying look." The entire collection also reflects the stages of decay, as the outfits move from nude colors to blacks, and then return again to an off-white decaying design with the avant-garde outfit.

"I’m also very careful about planning my designs, to have restraint in what I do and not give in to the urge to keep adding and keep doing more with the dress," he emphasizes. "Which is actually a common problem among Filipino designers. We don’t know when to stop." This is discipline especially evident in Jerome’s designs, where, because of the nature of couture and deconstruction combined, there would otherwise be the damning possibility of going overboard.

On two previous occasions, Jerome’s designs have seen the catwalks of Singapore, where he has been singled out for his characteristic approach hailing from Italian couture and even offered a scholarship in Institut de Moda which he has yet to take. Last year, his entries consisted of dresses playing with shades of gold, some in suede silk fabrics perforated to look like metal, others spray-painted with bronze to simulate rust, and yet others with Swarovski crystals, crushed raw silk details and swirl designs. All elements would indeed seem to account for his several principles in designing clothes: chaotic order, merging of styles, and necessary restraint.