In 2009, Xylk Lorena completed an overnight shift at McDonalds and joined a line of shoppers outside Livestock in Toronto. Bundled with sleeping bags and flasks, there were 18 people in line and only 16 pairs of YEEZYs available. About an hour before the doors were due to open, a group of masked men barged into the store, gathered-up the majority of the sneakers, and left in a blacked-out SUV. It was at that moment that Lorena first understood the kind of demand and cachet that orbits designer goods. “I stood in line for nine hours. And for what?,” he says. ”A G-SHOCK watch and a Livestock t-shirt that I could have purchased any day of the week.” 

Lorena was hit with a similar realisation ten years later when he spotted someone carrying a Barack Obama bag on the subway. “This wasn’t Obama’s standard pop art campaign image but a full-face print. I thought, ‘I want this bag, I’d wear this bag, I’d wear it so much if it was Pharrell’.” The decision to brandish a celebrity’s face on the side of a bag or step out in a pair of YEEZY sneakers comes from the same sort of thinking: that we express our cultural allegiances through our consumption of fashion. Only, with his latest project, Lorena is sending up consumerist behaviour by photo-printing Birkins onto cheap, heavy duty grocery bags. “I wanted to see Filipino titas and titos (aunties and uncles) in supermarkets putting their frozen tilapia and mango juice in a $30,000 'luxury' grocery bag,” he says. “I’m like the Pinoy Telfar, I’m ‘Pelfar’.”

Is he worried about receiving a cease and desist order from a certain Parisian maison? Not so much. This devil-may-care attitude is central to Lorena’s approach to fashion, with satire forming the bedrock of his streetwear label, LiFE DESiGN. “Humour, emotion, aesthetic. I constantly pull from the idea of an inside joke. Fun fashion rooted in the Filipino spirit.” As such, each colourway riffs on the language of Upper East Side Karens: a croc-embossed pink is named “The customer is always right”, a tan “Can I talk to your manager?”, and navy “I’m calling security”. He’s punching up as much as he’s parodying. “Not everyones gonna get it but those who do are invested and they feel valued,” he says. “To me, good design is tasteful humour, bad design is someone trying to be funny.” 

With these bags, Lorena is drawing on all the irreverence of Beate Karlsson, Glenn Martens, and JW Anderson – designers who play with traditional notions of luxury with balloon-knotted heels, velcro belt-skirts, and fake runway falls. “Fashion is in its meme era. With constant access to everything negative going on in the world, our collective need to laugh is at an all time high.” For him, this means challenging the traditional expectations of who gets to mediate status and capital through clothing. Lorena’s recent pop-up, for example, put salesmen in white cotton gloves like those they might wear at an expensive auction house, welcoming guests to “Sotheby’s”. “I like to keep things childlike, not childish, which is a very important distinction,” he says. After all, these aren’t fake Birkins, but “REAL GROCERY BAGS!”