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BOLD ISSUE 32 | APRIL 2015

DESIGNER SARA MELKI TYPIFIES THE BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS MAKING LEBANESE FASHION A SECTOR TO WATCH.

By Dan Hilton

ou might be forgiv-en for expecting that a 28-year-old with three years of experi-ence under their belt running their own business and brand

would be somewhat bullish, abrupt, even arrogant. Not so with Sara Melki. We meet at Espace M, the concept store in Horsh Tabet, Beirut, where the upper lev-el is dedicated to her designs. The bright, light space with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the luxury Hilton hotel is as open as she is, and from the moment we sit down for a coffee it becomes clear that this is the secret of her success.

Originally from the jolly seaside Leb-anese town of Jounieh, Melki comes from a creative background. With furni-ture-designing parents and a painter un-cle, art has been always been part of her life, and it is from this angle that she ap-proached fashion. “I think when you like art, everything is a continuity,” she says. A fine art graduate from the renowned Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), she found that an early experience in-terning at fashion house Maison Rabih Kayrouz was having a profound influence on her creative output. “All my teachers would say, ‘Oh Sara, we can see you love textiles.’ When you see my work from then, it’s always mix and match with tex-tiles and colors.”

Lebanon is blessed with some world-fa-mous names in fashion, such as Elie Saab, Zuhair Murad and Reema Acra, yet Melki points towards artists, travel and history as her influences. Her most recent collec-tion juxtaposes themes borrowed from a

SPECIAL REPORT HER PLACE, IN THE SUN

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Her place, in the sun Designer Sara Melki typifies the bright young things making Lebanese fashion a sector to watch.

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recent trip to Madagascar with the works of Walid Raad, whose wartime photogra-phy Melki finds inspiring. “And I love the work of (Joan) Miró,” she says. “All the paintings that have colors and mixing, I am amazed by them.”

Yet this somewhat unusual approach is perhaps what sets Melki apart, and keeps her distinct. “It’s a very rude, rude world and there’s lots of young designers,” says Valerie Nehme, brand and communica-tions manager at Sarah Melki. “So she has to always think differently and be differ-

ent from the other designers, not do the same. She has to have a vision and she has to think on a different level.”

Melki says her background in art helps her to be braver, to take more risks and to avoid finding herself in the pitfall of following too closely the trends that can make young Lebanese designers indis-tinguishable, and this is needed from a business perspective as well. According to Nehme the abundance of young Leba-nese designers “pushes her to innovate – in her branding, in her communications,

in strategy. In everything she has to re-think the brand just to be different from all the others.”

After ALBA, Melki moved to Paris, studying in Studio Bercot, the school that gave us Isabel Marant, and then hopped between fashion houses in Paris and New York, such as Malhia Kent and Proenza Schouler. So why move back to Lebanon? “I didn’t want to go abroad and learn all this good stuff and not come back to my country and give it a push,” Melki ex-plains. “So for me I’m proud to come back,

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and OK, thank you, I’m really thankful to Europe and the States for what I learned there, but it’s nice to come back and put all this background in your country.”

Melki also says that for a young design-er going it alone, Lebanon is a great place to build a base, an identity and a name for yourself. “Because it’s a small country, if you do something that the Lebanese like it’s really good because they talk a lot on social media,” she says. In Paris, Melki explains, social media doesn’t hold the same sway, but in Lebanon the constant chitter-chatter and follower harvesting of Facebook, Twitter and blogs are vital-ly important in getting your name out there.

This poses challenges as well. In the world of Lebanese fashion, bloggers such as Une Libanaise de Paris, whose blog at-tracts 400,000 visits a month, hold great sway over who buys what and which de-signers are on everybody’s lips. Designers

always need to keep them sweet and en-sure they are up to date with their latest collections. “Every collection you have to send them gifts, and sometimes they wear them and sometimes not,” Melki ex-plains. In such a small scene, seeing and being seen is of the upmost importance. “Always we have to go to events. Here, if you come to my event, I go to your event … You have to be always present every-where because people talk, so people can say ‘she was here, she is cool.’”

While Lebanon might be a good base for young designers to make a name for themselves, it poses unique challenges for those such as Melki who are setting up their own businesses and going it alone. Political and security turmoil has impact-ed the economy, and Melki says people are not buying as they once were. “But we don’t have to lose hope, we have to fight this and I will not say no,” she says. Open-ing a new store in Beirut’s trendy and

pedestrian-friendly Mar Mikhael is part of her push to allow the label to reach a greater audience despite an unforgiving climate. Having her own business clearly means the world to Melki. “It’s like having a newborn baby. I can’t tell you the feel-ing, it’s really nice,” she says. “When you see your name or when I go to a dinner or a party and I see someone wearing my design it’s grat-ifying. But it’s really scary as well, because I always have to be creative.”

However, there is little help out there for young, aspirational designers such as Melki. Many see Leba-non’s multitude of talented designers as an untapped potential resource for the economy, but little support from politi-cians has been forthcoming, Melki says. Initiatives such as Beirut Design Week have been put in place to rectify this. “We have a lot of designers during this week. There’s a lot of, you feel something is hap-pening in Beirut, and we are proud of this and we are happy,” says Melki. The mate-rial benefits of this, however, are less ob-vious. “I don’t think that a lot of money is coming in. A lot of people are coming in, yes, but a lot of money, no.”

Even the top boutiques in the country, such as Plum and Aishti, are unwilling to sell young Lebanese designers’ works, Melki says. “When you go abroad you see they are proud of their designers, even if they are small designers,” she explains, adding, “Here in Lebanon, it’s a shame for them to sell Lebanese designers. They are always looking out for big brands, which is very sad.”

But with the Mar Mikhael shop to open within weeks and a new collection on the horizon, Melki is only positive about her future in the Lebanese fashion industry. “I will do my collection, I will do a launch, I will do a big party and I will be more confident and wish the best for the coun-try,” she says.

YOU FEEL SOMETHING IS HAPPENING IN BEIRUT”