Sarkis Dersahagian sits opposite me with a mischievous glint in his eye, which I soon find is part of his character – he looks as if he always has something up his sleeve. Sporting a chequered navy blue shirt, rolled-up jeans, yellow suede shoes and a moustache, he tells me he never imagined doing anything else in life. “Fashion is so theatrical,” he says. “I love it.”
“I think it’s because he is a diva. You should see him at work, he’s like the Sound of Music in action,” Rayya interjects. More composed, but no less playful, she sits next to Sarkis in a long flowing black skirt, a distressed grey shirt and red lipstick. She too loves fashion but the first piece she made for herself wasn’t exactly a success. “My friend suddenly said, ‘Rayya, I think you’re naked!’” The dress had fallen to her ankles.
To Raya, fashion is both art and science. She flips through a book on futuristic fashion and embedded technologies. “I love Iris Van Herpen’s work,” she murmurs, running her fingers over a magnificent image of a metallic “necklace” of Medusa-like coils that morphs into a full-length body suit. Rayya has propensity for the three-dimensional in fashion and has been experimenting with new laser-cutting techniques and shape-memory materials, like Nitinol.
Although there is almost 10 years age difference between them, Sarkis and Rayya feel like close friends as much as classmates. Both are graduates of Beirut’s Esmod, the only internationally recognised fashion institute in the Arab world right now. “You were wearing a yellow dress and had short, frizzy hair,” Sarkis recalls of the time they first met. She was a jury member for his end-of-year project. “Everyone warned me that you were strict, but you took a look at my final collection and simply said, ‘I like your cut’.” They hit it off immediately.
After graduation in 2011, Sarkis began working as a pattern maker for Ronald Abdala, a rapidly emerging Lebanese designer, while Rayya was Head of Design over at Maison Rabih Keyrouz. Encouraged by her boss, she began to devote herself to her own label, Bird on a Wire, which she had begun in 2009 with a debut collection of square-shaped T-shirts, entitled ‘80x80x80’.
At some point during our conversation, Sarkis puts on one of Rayya’s skeletal-looking necklaces made of plaster, that unfurl to follow the neckline and shoulders. “You see, this is so majestic. I feel fabulous right now.”
But he’s quick to add that there’s a stereotype in the Arab world that the fashion industry is all glamour and glitz. “It’s important to know how the industry actually works, which is why I believe in apprenticeship,” he explains. “If you’re not preparing and implementing the collection for one season, then you’ll be conceiving the next. The work never ends.”
I ask them if they think haute couture will ever die, as mass production takes increasing precedence over handcrafting. Rayya says she thinks fashion will develop more into what is already being called ‘prêt-a-couture’, customised ready-to-wear and that for her, the future of fashion will be a move from the artificial to the organic.
“I have a more romantic vision but maybe that’s because I haven’t started out for myself yet,” Sarkis says, adding that for him, design shouldn’t be theoretical but rather, means coming up with clothes he can actually envision a woman wearing.
Though more obviously tomorrow in her designs, Rayya concurs. For her ‘Heterotopies’ collection, for example, which was inspired by Michel Foucault’s theories of spaces of Otherness, Raya wanted to create “dancing” forms but without using metal wiring or traditional boning. “I wanted something that was elastic and always returned to its original shape, where it would feel like there was a cloud around you. Or, as one client told me, as if you had a pet your were constantly taming.” It was working with industrial designer Cyrille Najjar on a project involving 3D printing that she discovered Nitinol, a superelastic alloy of nickel and titanium that can be stretched without losing the ‘memory’ of its original shape. And her collection was born. “It was about sensation for me,” she continues, “more than ‘outrageous’ materials.”
You might think, then that for this duo, the future lies there, in novel materials and techniques that verge more on engineering than ‘traditional’ fashion. While Rayya doesn’t dismiss the thought of working with nitinol or laser-cut copper again, both she and Sarkis are united in their belief that whatever they do, it has to be wearable.
“Definitely fashion shouldn’t be so futuristic that you need a manual to wear it, Sarkis says, adding that an important part of the new in design means not repeating what one’s done before. “Fashion can be fantasy, what we envision ourselves wearing, our alter egos, but at the end of the day, it should be practical also.”
