In Beirut, Where Fashion Lives Dangerously
Late last year, while working one afternoon in his atelier in central Beirut, the fashion designer Krikor Jabotian and his 20 or so staff members heard a very loud bang.
“It sounded like a bomb,” said Mr. Jabotian, who grew up in the city during the civil war that raged in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990 and started his label there five years ago. “But we just kept working. That’s just how we work in Beirut: expect the unexpected.”
It was a bomb. About four blocks away explosives had killed the Lebanese intelligence chief and destroyed most of the street. Beirut, again, tensed for violence.
But Mr. Jabotian just kept on making dresses.
Beirut traditionally has been described as the Middle East’s most fashionable city — but in recent decades the country has been better known for conflict than couture, especially today with the civil war in Syria.
“We kept on working because it was our way of supporting one another,” said the designer Rabih Kayrouz, who started his career in Lebanon but relocated to Paris in 2008.
“Of course, sometimes fashion is not a priority. For instance, at a time of crisis I wouldn’t do something like put on a big fashion week — that’s just insane,” said Mr. Kayrouz, who canceled a show in 2005 when a former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated. “But I wouldn’t close the business down either. You have this attitude of survival.”
Zuhair Murad, another Lebanese designer whose glamorous dresses have been worn by A-listers like Jennifer Lopez, Kristen Stewart and Jessica Alba, agreed. “Selling our product does not mean that we are frivolous,” he said. “We are providing for our customers, our employees, their families and their children just like everyone else. If anything, fashion has proven that Lebanon has more to offer than war and violence.”
Much of Lebanon’s domestic fashion industry is focused on private commissions. After graduating from one of several available programs — the best-known school is a branch of the French school ESMOD — designers’ careers often begin with bespoke work for wealthy clients from the Arab Gulf states, then expand into ready-to-wear if they are successful.
That path has been followed by many of Lebanon’s biggest fashion names — the likes of Mr. Murad, Mr. Kayrouz, Elie Saab, Georges Chakra and Reem Acra, some of whom now produce ready-to-wear collections elsewhere but serve their high-paying private clients when at home.
Such work is lucrative for beginners. “A couture dress that costs around $3,000 to make could sell for around $10,000 — making the potential profits off couture very tempting,” said a recent article in the local English-language newspaper, The Daily Star.
It is hard to determine exactly how much the local fashion industry is worth, but a 2007 study on Lebanon’s creative industries authored by the School of Business at the American University of Beirut suggested that it would be more than $40 million.
Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity. Pierre Omidyar
