Through the Eyes of Rabih Kayrouz

Seeing flou

A tall girl with deep blue eyes enters the mansion where Rabih Kayrouz presents his Haute Couture collection. As if the inhabitants had fled, the silhouettes evoke a chromatic pulse between the white walls. “Acid colours, like strands of light to awaken the senses. I look at the fabrics before I touch them. My eyes are always open. Rabih Kayrouz looks at his phone to send me the poem he wrote as a programme:

“I see you draped in a coat 
I see you protected 
I see you holding your jacket at the waist 
I see you walk danse laugh 

I see you embraced by dresses

I see you free  

I see you walking in a city 
I see you dancing in a bubble 
I see you as you live 
I love you”

A flow of fine gold, a suit with a jacket draped like a gust of wind. The eye is there, stretching the lines, shifting them, surprising the outline, fixing the roundness of a gesture: “Mastery means managing to keep the gesture. Haute couture is not linked to events. It is a technique. It’s the way you make a pair of trousers or a shirt. It’s not about dazzling, but about feeling that on the inside, there is an acute eye for construction.”

From his Parisian atelier on the Boulevard Raspail, which employs some 20 people, he refers to “their eyes in their hands.” He continues: “There are no rules. Haute couture means working “au chic.” Accidents are allowed, that’s what breathes life into the creation. If you control too much, if you smooth out too much, life is extinguished.”

To see the real Flou, in other words. In the virtuoso eyes of Kayrouz, the art of haute couture is that, even a dress like a column of muslin, seems to have just been touched.