He's the most popular Middle Eastern designer in the world, his glamorous frocks adorning celebrities from Cannes to Hollywood; he has launched residences in Dubai and a yacht in Abu Dhabi; but it was only this month that Elie Saab opened his first store in the UAE. The 250 square metre Dubai Mall boutique, which is currently stocking the spring/summer 2010 collection, opened this month, and although the party will officially start with a big launch in September, we decided to mark the occasion now by inviting Saab to share with us his original sketches for the collection.
The spring/summer collection is a special one. When I interviewed Saab last year, in Beirut, he had just shown his autumn/winter 2009/10 collection in Paris and was explicit about the fact that his style was evolving into something just as glamorous yet sleeker, more modern and more pared down. "The identity of the house is still there, but it's more shaped, more straightened, graphic, more purified," he told me, adding that the coming years would, he believed, impose a new fashion direction. The continuity in the summer collection, as he cements his new style, is evident, with dresses that are clean and simple yet devastatingly glamorous.
As he was talking to me, in a room at his atelier, he was compulsively sketching too, a habitual multi-tasker, and he discussed his celebrity fans, saying: "When a celebrity chooses to wear a dress of mine, this means she's choosing my vision of a woman. If she didn't like the vision of Elie Saab she wouldn't come and choose a dress of his. The A-list have all the choices of all the designers in the world, so when they choose an Elie Saab dress this is because they are convinced of my vision for the woman he wants."
Well, you don't get much closer to the vision of Elie Saab than his original sketches, exclusively in Arts & Life.
