Faith has always given creatives a vocabulary. What is rarer is a designer who bothers to learn its grammar. This Cebuana designer is one of them.
Most of us have met David and Goliath somewhere along the way — a story told so often that its details can become shorthand for courage of the unlikely. Sarah Tutor chooses to linger where the familiar story usually ends, looking past the giant, the stone and the victory to the man who carried the story long after.
Tutor’s latest collection, “Fragrant Hymn,” follows the same faith-driven creative path that won her the Cebu Young Designers Competition 2025 with “Hosanna.” This time, her collection is an intimate meditation on Psalm 51, a passage from her mother’s favorite book in the Bible. Across five looks, she traces King David’s journey from pasture to throne, from decadence to repentance and finally toward wisdom.
Where imagery might have offered Tutor a shortcut, she chooses instead to dwell. To study a single line until it yields a texture. To let a symbol wait until it is ready to be worn.
There is the coarse warmth of sheep’s wool. The leather of David’s sling. The taut lines of a lyre. Patchwork left deliberately unhealed. And a purple pulled from a flower Tutor has never once seen in person.
In SunStar Cebu Lifestyle, this Cebuana fashion storyteller offers a faith that feels uniquely grounded in study and reflection.
A white canvas, twice
“It speaks of God’s radical love toward broken beings,” she said.
David, its most storied author, carries a particular weight for Tutor because of what Psalm 51 says about a God who loves broken people anyway. History remembers David as an adulterer and a murderer. Scripture remembers him differently: a man after God’s own heart.
That contradiction becomes the collection’s spine — and, quite literally, its shape.
“I wanted to show David’s progression, from being a shepherd to someone who left an everlasting inheritance,” Tutor said.
Visually, that meant beginning the collection on a white canvas and returning to one by its end — a full circle, innocence bookending redemption. Threaded through the middle is the hyssop, rendered in purple and green, acting less as ornament than as a catalyst, nudging the story forward look by look.
Five looks, one chapter
“Fragrant Hymn” opens with “Shepherd,” built from three references to David’s earliest years.
“In the first look, ‘Shepherd,’ there are three elements I highlighted, namely the lyre-inspired bib, the slingshot headpiece and the sheep’s wool layered pants — all of which come from the early life of King David as a shepherd,” Tutor said.
A bib draws its shape from the kinnor, Hebrew for lyre, and the stringed instrument traditionally associated with David’s psalms. A headpiece reimagines his sling not as the familiar Y-shaped slingshot of popular illustration, but as what history actually describes: a leather pouch strung between two long cords.
“The third element I incorporated is sheep’s wool. By weaving ‘retaso’ from chiffon, cotton, linen, and wool, I achieved a textured fabrication meant to resemble sheep’s wool. This indicates David’s humble beginnings as a shepherd before he was anointed king,” she said.
From there, the story keeps moving. “King” marks his ascent. “Decadence” traces his fall and God’s refusal to look away. “Hesought,” already released alongside “Shepherd,” turns toward repentance. “Sophia” closes the collection by looking to Solomon and the wisdom that would carry his father’s unfinished legacy forward.
Hyssop
Threaded through all five looks is the hyssop — the herb named in Psalm 51:7, long used as a metaphor for God’s redemptive love. The biblical plant may not be the one we know today, but its imagined purple bloom becomes “Fragrant Hymn’s” defining color, chosen for what it meant before Tutor ever knew what it looked like.
Nowhere does it carry more weight than in “Hesought.”
“The title ‘Hesought’ is a combination of ‘He’ and ‘sought,’ which I thought sounded like ‘hyssop,’ the shrub,” she said, distilling the moment in David’s story when he had fallen furthest and was still being pursued.
“Psalm 51 speaks deeply of the broken nature of man, so I wanted to translate that through elements of distress and patchwork,” Tutor said. “The florals, the hyssop, serve to balance these elements — symbolizing the binding love of God to the brokenness of a man.”
The patchwork barong and terno at the heart of “Hesought” were conceived as part of a collaborative project among fellow Cebuano designers, artisans and artists in celebration of Philippine Independence Day. Each contributor worked from an individual theme, tasked with weaving Filipino identity into their own interpretation. For Tutor, that meant letting Psalm 51 meet the textures of Philippine craftsmanship.
None of it, she’s quick to note, could exist alone. Manuel Jamio, Ar. King Rosales, Kheemberly Coronel, Reynan Pelare and John Ivan Galochino contributed as designers. Jomer Secarana and Lance Patalinjug handled makeup, with hair by Sweeney Aytona. Models Michael and Stacy under Abert Catamco gave the garments movement, while photographer Jim San captured the results.
Character development, in cloth
“Oftentimes, when I explore subject matters outside the Bible, I tend to overthink,” she admitted — second-guessing her accuracy, her research, her relevance and whether the idea has truly become the garment she intended.
Scripture, by contrast, offers her a different kind of freedom. Anchored in her faith, she feels less burdened by her own limitations, less at the mercy of the shorthand that can so easily creep into translation.
The photograph only ever shows the result. The meaning lives in everything that came before it.
Three looks remain — “King,” “Decadence” and “Sophia” — before “Fragrant Hymn” is complete.
For Tutor, wisdom doesn’t end with Solomon. It points further still, toward Christ. She sees in David a foreshadowing — a shepherd who becomes king, echoing the Good Shepherd who is also eternal King. His fall and repentance become part of a larger story about grace that refuses to give up on anyone.
“Even before we sought Him, He first sought us,” Tutor said. It is the thought that seems to hold the whole collection together. Not perfection, but pursuit.
“Though the Bible is the most widely purchased book in the world, it is also one of the most stigmatized, often due to misrepresentation or the misuse of its words for selfish gain. However, reading it for myself profoundly changed my perspective,” she said.
Reading it for herself, she said, led her somewhere different: toward stories about creation, art, people and community and, crucially for a designer, toward beauty.