By their very nature, wedding dresses are crafted to be prized and precious. However, not many designers have the aesthetic sensibility and skill to render a T-shirt or romper as exquisitely as a bridal gown. Reem Acra is one of those who can. Since she began incorporating red carpet and every-day wear into her design repertoire, Acra has accorded traditionally casual garments privileged membership in her magisterial design world.
Her rare talent was captured in Style.com´s Laird Borrelli-Persson's review of the Lebanese designer´s Spring 2010 Paris catwalk collection, Laird reported that, ''In Acra's hands the jumpsuit was transformed, through soigné draping, from a tomboyish article of daywear into something for a seductive evening in a modernist Neutra setting.''
Alongside her magnificently graceful silk and beaded ball-gowns, Acra has presented ivory lace T-shirts, fluid silver chiffon cocktail dresses and alabaster silk pyjama trousers which could easily serve as wedding wear for an unconventionally casual bride or as simply gorgeous garments for an elegant woman's regular evening activities.
According to Acra, her customer is a woman who is "glamorous; she knows luxury; she’s cultivated. She loves to travel; she loves life and has passion for it." For such a woman, a wedding day is unlikely to be the only occasion where she wants fine and artful style. As Acra explains via email from her Paris studio, "I introduced Ready-To-Wear and Eveningwear collections because my customers were clamouring for the Reem Acra aesthetic beyond their wedding day. They kept asking for more and more!''
Acra´s introduction to actual bridal wear owed more to chance than design. After training with New York´s Fashion Institute of Technology and its sister program in Paris, Acra explains, ''I had a friendly bet with a friend that if she got married, I would do her wedding gown. She did get engaged and she took me up on her offer. She happened to be a socialite and there was a lot of press surrounding her wedding. My wedding business was launched soon afterwards."
Since that serendipitous start, Acra has established herself over almost 15 years as a leading bridal designer. She launched her first bridal collection in 1997, followed by a ready-to-wear line in 2003. But Acra´s artistry originated with her grandmother´s celebrated hand-made silk flowers. Shortly after a young Reem started at the American University in Beirut, she was discovered by a fashion editor who admired the intricately embroidered silk organza gown that Acra created from her mother´s treasured dining-room tablecloth and wore to a party. Ten days later, the editor hosted a fashion show of Acra´s student work.
Nowadays as a mature bridal designer, Acra´s intricate beadwork, embroidery and cross-cultural inspiration have added unique richness and interest to the conventionally considerate wedding-wear market. By incorporating gold bullion needlework, seed pearls, shadow embroidery and clusters of Swarovski crystals, Acra creates wedding gowns remarkable for their couture-level and thoughtful opulence. Yet despite their elaborate luxuriousness, Acra´s designs are best known for their grace and ease on the body. Her past collections have been inspired by origami, Japanese gardens and Rococo art. Yet even at her most luscious, her wedding dresses permit a wide range of easy movement and flow comfortably.
The same combination of physical emancipation and elegance defines her red-carpet gowns which are worn by Nicole Ritchie, Olivia Wilde and Taylor Swift and often evoke comparisons to Madeleine Vionnet and the heyday of old Hollywood glamour. Acra´s use of silk is particularly striking when she combines her flowing silk silhouettes with chiffon or materials of contrasting texture.
Despite the diverse settings where her work can be worn, Acra sees continuity as central to her design sensibility. As she says, "The overall themes are always the same – luxury in a modern way, exquisite attention to detail, and hand craftsmanship – but I get inspired by my worldwide travels, interesting people I meet, and art exhibits I see. Every collection has a different source to inspire me. First and foremost, style is being confident and comfortable in your own skin. It’s about an attitude."
This spirit of increasing accessible sensibility was exemplified by Acra's pragmatic decision to forgo a catwalk show during this season's Paris Fashion Week and to present her collection instead through ‘Do You Love Me?’, a romantic three-minute fashion film. The goth-glamour video features sixteen-year-old French identical twins Elena and Manuela Lazic with matching manically ungroomed hair and vermilion lips. They each perform feline stretches on a slowly moving wheel inside a rough industrial room while wearing Acra´s femme fatale line of luxury wear, which Acra describes as ideal for "Wednesday Addams having a playdate with Eloise." The collection itself is a compelling combination of sumptuous fabrics and relaxed cuts with metallic sequined mini-skirts, silk peasant blouses, ruffled details and sensual drapery. Her palette is sexy and luxurious ranging from black, navy, burgundy, mustard and iridescent olive green to silver and gold.
One grey-yellow floral silk dress falls gently off one shoulder and billows in soft folds over the knee. A gold sleeveless silk dress with a white smoky pattern is held loosely at the waist with a big black bow, creating the impression of gift-wrapping around the model´s body.
A black sequin suit with a square jacket and mini-skirt has Victorian broaches linked by metal chains as fastenings instead of standard buttons. The accompanying accessories line includes elaborate Victorian-inspired metal pendants on velvet ribbon, jewelled silk cuffs and playfully oversized cut-glass necklaces which have both a vintage aesthetic and a youthful freshness as their scale creates the impression that the wearer is a happy child experimenting with grown-up gear. The light spirit is a joyful counterpoint to the serious commitment expressed in Acra´s wedding-wear.
In Do You Love Me´s climatic moments, one of the twins is seen anxiously hooked up to a polygraph machine, wearing a stunning draped sheer black top gathered at her waist with a black bow and falling in rich folds over a knee-length satin red plaid tulip skirt. The question "Do You Love Me?" appears over images of the machine´s mechanics while the delicately featured model emanates nervous energy and the scratches on the lie detector transmit her answer. Without giving away the answer, the most obvious truth is that Acra´s collection absolutely deserves our love.
Reem Acra is available through regional Boutique 1 and Saks Fifth Avenue outlets.
