There is a sense that now is Elie Saab’s moment. His exquisite couture dresses are adored not only by Hollywood starlets on the red carpet but also by the most persnickety of fashion insiders and, crucially, by actual paying customers. Far from arriving like a bolt from the blue, however, he has been quietly pursuing a distinctive vision for the past two decades. Steve King travels to Beirut—the city that has shaped and inspired the designer and his work and that he still calls home—to meet a modern master.
In 1982, seven years into the Lebanese civil war, Israel invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut. In the same year an 18-year-old local prodigy named Elie Saab held his first fashion show and opened his first atelier. His reputation spread quickly and his business grew, first in Lebanon, then across the Middle East, then around the rest of the world.
In 2006, during which conflict between Hezbollah and Israeli forces flared and more than 1,000 Lebanese died in intensive bombardment, Saab became the first Arab to be admitted to the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the industry’s governing body.
At the time I met him, in Beirut at the end of June 2011, the papers were full of speculation about the future of the Arab spring. Would Assad’s Syria be the next to fall? And what then for neighboring Lebanon, with its deep sectarian divisions and simmering volatility?
None of these concerns is or ever was the least bit obvious in Elie Saab’s work. His dresses are the softly whispering stuff of luminous dream visions. Nevertheless, having spent some time with him in Beirut and in Paris, I think the bomb-blasted backdrop is relevant. Mr. Saab—nobody I spoke to called him Elie—is a man who inhabits a world of contrasts so extreme as to appear irreconcilable. It is a peculiar niche, but one in which he seems to feel entirely at home, if not entirely comfortable.
Our first meeting takes place in the garden of his town house in Gemmayze, in east Beirut. The garden is bordered on the street side by the house itself, supposedly among the oldest still standing in the city, and by high walls on the other sides. It is one of his three addresses in Lebanon. The others are in Rabieh, some distance outside Beirut, and Faqra, in the mountains.
We sit at a long table beneath a trellis of vines. The sun has set and tea lights lead the way to a portable bar parked in front of an ornamental fountain. Bottles are arrayed on glass shelves lit from below and the whole apparatus glows in the dark like an offshore oil rig. Half a dozen or so of Saab’s friends and colleagues chatter in Arabic, French, and English. Champagne corks pop. The air is thick with the fragrance of apples—not, as I suppose for a moment, someone’s freshly washed hair but the smoke from Saab’s apple-flavored hubble-bubble pipe. His Jack Russell, Oscar, is agitated by cats beyond the garden walls. The city is out there, too, along with the cats, invisible and almost inaudible. Saab puffs on his pipe, watchful and quiet, his mind no doubt on his latest collection, due to be shown in Paris in a week or so and still far from ready. You get the feeling that he does not like to hold court but that he very much likes to be entertained.
Only once does he become agitated. He and his wife, Claudine, the daughter of one of his early clients, have three sons. I ask if they are with him in Beirut. They are not. Although he divides his time between Beirut, Paris, and wherever else work takes him, his children live in Geneva. Without further prompting, and with his friends’ voices falling silent, he speaks, briefly but with strong feeling, in halting but effective English, about the reasons why.
“Look at Lebanon. Look at its strategic position. We have many religions. We have great freedoms. But we have generations who have known only war, and who are ready to fight again. And for what? For nothing. Nothing. I don’t want my children to know this.” Is it possible to remain here and remain optimistic? “What is good in Beirut, what is good in Lebanon in general, is the population. This is the difference. The Lebanese people suffer but they want to be better — everyone, every family always wants to be better, day after day.” He pauses, then adds: “I believe in the Lebanese people. So my heart stays here.”
He is a tortoise in an industry better known for its hares. He has sought and achieved success rather than celebrity. He is by no means a recluse or an oddball. He clearly has a gift for friendship, speaking affectionately and often of old friends. In person he is straightforward and down-to-earth. Nothing about his appearance or manner screams “fashion.” Although he scowls a lot, his face is gentle and guileless, especially when he grins, which he does frequently. He dresses well but unremarkably, in that universal blazer, jeans, and loafers way.
He was born in Damour, a village on the coast south of Beirut, in 1964, the eldest son of a middle-class Maronite timber merchant. Damour was desecrated and mostly destroyed by the P.L.O. in 1976, in one of the early atrocities of the civil war. Rather than moving abroad, as so many Lebanese did, the Saabs moved into central Beirut, to be nearer his father’s family.
At the age of nine he started making patterns from newspapers and dresses from any material he could get his hands on. His parents wished he would do something else: “Like all normal families, they would have liked me to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer.” But they relented when it became clear that dressmaking was the only thing he wanted to do, and that he was very good at it. Soon he was spending all of his spare time making dresses for his family and friends. He was, in a way, in business long before he was in business. Apart from a brief stint at a Paris design school when he was 17, he is self-taught.
His debut show, at the Casino du Liban, was well received. He made regular trips to Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dubai, taking orders for dresses that incorporated his signature blend of Western and Middle Eastern elements. Queen Rania of Jordan wore Elie Saab for her coronation. One of his dresses—somewhat less demure, presumably, than Queen Rania’s, and thickly embroidered with emeralds and diamonds—was reportedly sold for $2.4 million.
Recognition beyond the Middle East came overnight when Halle Berry wore Elie Saab to the 2002 Oscars. Saab smiles as he remembers that the star required some extra sequined foliage to cover what would otherwise have been a nearly naked left breast. Her tearful acceptance speech for the best-actress award was seen by tens of millions of viewers. The brand exposure was colossal, and Saab has been a red-carpet favorite ever since.
Though he had been showing in Paris since 2000, he at last planted his flag on the summit of Mount Couture in 2006, when he was admitted as a membre correspondant of the Chambre Syndicale, the highest honor the organization bestows on non-French designers.
The names on the order lists and Stockmen—those eerily headless mannequins belonging to regular clients, whittled down or padded out to real-life size—in his Beirut atelier are a roll call of the Arab A-list. He sells between 400 and 800 couture dresses a year, with a starting price of about $35,000. He has dabbled in industrial design and has a diffusion wedding-dress line, which is marketed through the Spanish bridal-wear giant Pronovias. This year he introduced his first “pre-collection” and a perfume, simply called Elie Saab. But couture remains his priority, and that priority is underwritten by a loyal Arab clientele.
This clientele, however, remains largely invisible to the general public, spending and displaying its money in private. Even so, as Julia Robson, writing in The Daily Telegraph, recently pointed out, “It’s no secret the ‘currency’ of couture has switched from dollars and euros to Saudi and Qatari riyals, Chinese yuans and Indian rupees.” You get a hint of this just scanning the growing number of foreign designers’ names showing at couture week. Among the Middle Eastern contingent, Zuhair Murad, Georges Chakra, Rabih Kayrouz, and Bouchra Jarrar have followed the path to Paris blazed by Saab.
Alanood Al-Sabah, a Kuwaiti sheika and co-founder of Octium Jewelery who moves in heavily coutured circles, notes that the Middle East has long been an influence on couture. She mentions Poiret’s harem pants, Saint Laurent’s caftans and Givenchy’s golden burkas. But she adds that it is only in recent years that couturiers have really “got” Arab women. “Elie Saab understands the way Arab women live now. His creations carry a message of subliminal freedom and luxury. His success is the result of merging the values of the Middle East with the modern standards of the West, to produce a fusion of the two in wearable works of art.”
