Rabih Kayrouz is always in his element when interacting directly with people: nudging someone to try on a jacket, showing off a gown’s construction (or remarkable lack thereof), tracing the lines of a skirt like a calligraphic gesture. As he arrives at the 25th anniversary of his label, he has been welcoming people to a showroom and pop-up store instead of staging a show. Its location on rue St. Roch is down the street from the former fashion school that shaped his career.
He titled this collection Back Home, in part because of this attachment, but mostly because he sees the clothes as representing a certain warmth for the “personage” who wears them. “I imagined her entering her house being greeted and hugged by her different pieces. The dress is there, the coat is there…,” he said as he lifted a floor-grazing knit coat from the rack for a closer look at its double-sided ink-splotch effect.
Kayrouz is a storyteller par excellence, but his designs convey a superlative degree of savoir faire. A jacket split at the sides, easing its structure into soft panels; the micro-pleated body of a dress snatching the waist without corset rigidity; the various floaty silk charmeuse blouses, sheaths, and even cargo-style pants that can be worn by a wide spectrum of women accommodating age and figure. The fact that several pieces were reedited from previous collections did not detract from their interest, particularly because they returned in brilliant hues of leaf green, ochre, and purple.
An upper level has been reserved for an edit of couture gowns that capture how Kayrouz can coax breathtaking volumes from a single rectangle of taffeta—cutting, gathering, delineating with grosgrain, and building shape instinctively (this is when you realize how draping from ancient civilizations is the most timeless dressing of all). One style, for instance, can be cinched like a T-shirt while giving red-carpet oomph. And once again, vivid, electric shades of blue, orange, and fuchsia underscored how Kayrouz has spent a quarter decade distilling his point of view to the most elemental—and elegant—ideas. “I never stop. I revisit, I evolve. Certain pieces I let go, others arrive. It’s a constant process,” he said.
After Monday, the space will become a store offering the current spring collection for at least the next three months. “To me, this is a celebration,” said Kayrouz. “I want my brand to be known and seen and accessible.” And if you’re lucky, he just might be there.
