Rabih Kayrouz is one of the rare couturiers who remained faithful to the vow of sobriety expressed during the Covid-19 pandemic: he stopped showing but still presents his two annual collections of women’s ready-to-wear by appointment, in his Parisian workshop on the left bank. An old theater with large bay windows, hidden in an interior courtyard, which also serves as a shop.
This day in March 2024, we meet customers there who have come to try on the dresses and coats for fall-winter 2024-2025 which color the racks with their aubergine, royal blue or electric pink intensity. The presence of these buyers does not prevent the fifty-year-old, born in Lebanon, from responding to the interview or demonstrating the practicality of his creations: “It’s silk taffeta, ultralight, wrinkle-resistant; it folds like a K-Way », he explains, taking an orange evening dress from its hanger which he rolls into a ball. Since its beginnings in 1999, Rabih Kayrouz has been plowing the path of a refined aesthetic, with geometric, practical and light shapes, which seem to escape gravity.
The year 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of his house and also his return to business. Injured in the head during the explosion in the port of Beirut in the summer of 2020, the designer was in convalescence for a long time; his workshop, destroyed, was reconstituted in another building in the Lebanese capital which he inaugurated in March. “It was the first event we organized there in five years, it moved me”, breathes the designer, who is still the majority shareholder of his brand, but brought in financial partners in 2016 and 2017 to support its development, at his own pace. After opening a store in London in 2020, he is considering a new address in Paris.
You have always lived and worked between Paris and Beirut. What impact has this had on the way you think about clothing?
When I started in Lebanon, I only made evening and wedding dresses. Although they were pure, they lacked urban inspiration. When I moved to Paris in 2009, I was obsessed with the idea of making clothes for the city, the street. I imagined the split trench [devenu un classique de la marque] because I saw a woman embarrassed by her coat as she ran to catch the bus. However, when I am only in Paris, I miss Lebanon: the light, the proximity to nature… I have had the chance to always live between two countries and this is felt in my clothes: the shapes are Parisian, Mediterranean colors.
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