What do you buy a 19-year-old?
The first Artwork shirts I owned were presents. They arrived folded, with fun little drawings or sayings on the front, handed over at birthdays or picked up on long mall afternoons with my friends. But I moved to Canada for a few years, and the brand then slipped out of my life the way things do when you are far from the malls that raised you.
Eventually, I came home and found out who owned Artwork: Cristine Syjuco, who goes by Tinay, and whom I now know. When I told her I was a fan, she gave me a few pieces from her new collection—Garden Break, made with Filipino painter Froilan Calayag—which was released last June in selected Artwork stores and online.
His earlier shirts for the brand, part of the Art Fair Philippines merch, sold out fast. His paintings are playful and dark at once. Artwork says this collection leans brighter than his usual work.
I opened the box and knew it was not for me. The imagery is stranger than what I usually go for, and I like things that look optimistic. But the pieces themselves are well-made. The laptop sleeve keeps everything snug. The notebook has a fabric cover and blank pages—better than lined paper for anyone who draws, because nothing on the page tells you where to begin.
I stood there, holding a notebook made for someone who makes things, and I knew exactly who that someone was: my cousin.
Meet my cousin
My cousin Lauren is 19. I am 29. We are family and we are night and day. She likes horror, though when I asked about it, she corrected me, because what she is really after is the psychology behind it rather than the films.
Her verdict on this collaboration with Artwork was blunter: odd and cute at the same time. Things that are too put together do not appeal to her anymore, she told me. That is why she collects Fugglers, plushies with teeth in them, and why a handmade-looking squid like Coraline’s means more to her than anything polished.
That is close to how Calayag’s work operates, and she got there without knowing his name.
What we share and what we do not
It would be easy to write us off as opposites, but sit with her long enough and the common ground shows up. We both love makeup. Hers is colorful and mine is invisible since I skip foundation entirely and consider a face finished when nobody can tell I worked on it.
The pleasure is the same. She wears bright shades to bring out the most of herself, and the local brand she is most drawn to is Issy Cosmetics for its colors.
We both love dressing up. She styles her hair to make it pop, wears dangling earrings with strange designs, and collects vintage jewelry with animals on it, rings especially. We are both deciding how we want to be seen. She just decides louder.
I then asked what to call her style, expecting a genre since she dresses more deliberately than most people I know. She told me she stopped naming it. Hunting for a category got exhausting, and she changed too much for the labels to hold. I wanted the category at her age. She has decided the category is work, and she seems freer for it.
What she wishes people would give her
Ask Lauren what she wants, and she does not say clothes. She wants a digital camera: a Samsung with a screen on the front so she can frame selfies with her friends. And she can tell you exactly how digicams handle color and exposure differently from a phone.
She wants a bass amp. An acoustic guitar. CDs from any music store still selling them. She also has a soft spot for household things that are cute and useful at once. Her paintbrushes live in a vase shaped like a fish from Flying Tiger, and she drinks her tea from a mug with a face on it.
Her rule is that a present should feed something she already does and still be in use in five or 10 years. She has more clothes and art materials than she can finish, and she is trying to buy less this year. She is also sentimental enough to bend her own rule since she has worn nearly everything I have ever handed her.
That stayed with me. Buying for her means knowing what she makes, what she listens to, and what she keeps returning to—not what her aesthetic is called. The Artwork shirt worked because a Filipino painter put an image on it that lives exactly where her interests already are.
She is not looking for approval
At 19, I was still figuring out what I was allowed to like, and I let too many other people answer that for me. Lauren is not doing that. She is not looking for approval. She likes things that are odd and a little unsettling, and she does not water any of it down so the rest of us can keep up.
I am proud of her. I am also aware that I am watching her do at 19 what took me most of my 20s. So if you are buying for a 19-year-old who is anything like her, start with her list instead of mine.
