MANILA – Thinking that the setting of an urban Asian tropical milieu naturally lends itself to the flouting of casual dress rules that one normally follows with tedious consistency at home but which fly out the window immediately after clearing customs, a group of male German tourists on Tuesday donned en masse the porkpie hats the leader of their group purchased at Boracay Outfitters in the Terminal 2 arrivals area of Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
Although delighted with themselves in their classic but somewhat obvious vacay menage-a-what stylistic foray, the move drew absolutely zero gasps of bewitched astonishment from onlookers, who at last count had seen 627,428 pride-swollen Western adult male holidaymakers troop through the airport wearing some version of the porkpie hat in the last year alone.
Manny Gonzales, the clerk at Boracay Outfitters who sold the hats to the group, said that although he was profiting handsomely from the trade, he and all the everyday Filipinos who came into contact with such groups would prefer not to have to feign unbridled couturistic joy at their jaunty angularity for the sake of making a few more bucks and possibly lifting themselves out of sustainable poverty.
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“I do not want to be the person to tell them that they don’t actually look ‘cute’ in a porkpie hat like a 12-year-old Manila pool-room hustler with a bad attitude and worse smoking habit would, but if this is the image they want to give off to the world, who’s to stop them?” Gonzales remarked. “If acting astonished at the sheer boldness of their interpretation of adult holiday couture gets me a few extra tips, I guess I and millions of other Filipinos in the tourism industry can live with it.”
Gonzales said that as he usually did, he would file a complaint in this instance with the International Society to Prevent Grown-Ass Men But Especially German Tourists From Wearing Porkpie Hats. A spokesman for the ISPGAMBEGTFPPH, Pierre Duchannes, said the society would issue a worldwide alert about the German group in Manila, but didn’t think it would have much effect considering all the men would soon lose their hats, Mykita sunglasses, MeisterSinger watches and all the contents of their wallets at Manila nightclub Exklusiv when they visited it later the same evening.