A look at the rise of Lebanese fashion designers

With multiple A-listers wearing their creations at the Cannes Film Festival and successful shows at the recently concluded Paris Fashion Week, designers from Lebanon are proving themselves a force to be reckoned with.

A model presents a creation by Lebanese designer Zuhair Murad at Paris Fashion Week autumn/winter 2015-16. Stephane Mahe / Reuters

The rarefied world of haute couture today is about luxury occasion clothes, and Lebanese designers are masters of the category. Take Elie Saab, for instance. At the recently ­concluded Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week, the celebrity designer hosted a party to inaugurate his large new boutique on the Avenue George V, giving clients the perfect occasion to wear his shimmering lace dresses.

They had no shortage of choice – Saab is known for his beautiful evening dresses, a point not missed on A-listers, who, like his clients, undoubtedly will be clamouring to slip into his ­flattering, new, gilded haute couture gems.

Inspired by the glistening golden palaces of Byzantium, gold thread has been used extensively throughout the collection of almost diaphanous empire-line and ballerina dresses. The models sweetly coiffed with golden laurels in their hair and on their wrists – made it clear the range is aimed at women who see themselves as princesses.

Long, lace column gowns with glimmering organic ­embroideries and sheer tulle sections in the skirts and torso, play on transparency, evoking the three-­dimensionality of ­flora.

Saab made sure his palette mirrored this, doing away with his traffic-­stopping bright gowns for a softer colour wheel.

Gold- and silver-embroidered dresses captured the hues of metal. Elsewhere, nude pink evoked flesh, pale terre verte the plants, and beige and black, the Earth.

Also from Lebanon, Zuhair Murad’s and Georges ­Hobeika’s strength lies in their irresistibly feminine evening wear. Each has a core clientele of the super elite and scores of celebrities who keenly watched the new autumn/winter collections that were presented in Paris last week.

Both designers experienced well-earned success dressing the stars on the Cannes red carpet in May. Murad dressed Chinese star Li Bingbing, Chanel Iman and Mad Max actress Michelle Rodriguez in a daring black ­tattoo-embroidered gown, while Georges Hobeika had Virginie Ledoyen, Eva Longoria and Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki to his credit.

Doing Cannes, Hobeika said, gave exceptional global exposure and impact to his label especially as Cannes now sits alongside the Oscars in importance as an international showcase for fashion. Their red-carpet success is undoubtedly based on creating collections brim full with glamorous evening wear.

Murad’s new cosmic-themed collection is sure to inspire many, featuring midnight hues twinkling with a galaxy of starry embroideries on gowns and jumpsuits. Most memorable were a long, inky, velvet, hooded cape over a crystal-embroidered tulle sheath and a black tulle ball gown covered in silver shooting star embroidery. Georges Hobeika, on the other hand, was inspired by that very British custom of five o’clock tea, with charming pale shantung silk and guipure lace dresses abundantly embellished with English garden floral appliqués and pretty embroideries.

One of the most important parts of a couture house’s business is bridal wear: every catwalk show finishes with a bride. Given that a wedding dress can run into tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars, and that a commission might include dressing the bride’s mother and her bridesmaids, it is easy to see what keeps a house buoyant.

In June, two beautiful and talented jewellery designers got married in couture. United Kingdom-based Lebanese jewellery designer Sabine Ghanem wore a custom-designed ­marabou-trimmed Schiaparelli dress and cape for her marriage to the great-grandson of an oil tycoon, Joseph Getty, while her friend Noor Fares (daughter of the former deputy prime minister of Lebanon, Issam Fares) chose Giambattista Valli to design her white lace appliqué gown. Valli also designed one of the dresses Amal Clooney wore for her wedding weekend.