Renaissance Renaissance (Q9008)
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Renaissance Renaissance is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Renaissance Renaissance |
Renaissance Renaissance is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Early this month, as Paris Fashion Week was winding down, Cynthia Merhej transformed her apartment into a showroom and put as brave a face as possible on a situation that already was challenging and only has gotten worse since. “When things are bad, it’s good to have something to throw yourself into,” said the Beirut-based designer. “We’re very grateful to have distraction from the reality of things, and fashion is a great distraction.”By the same token, fashion has always been a formidable vehicle for resistance. A year ago, as war broke out in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Merhej said she sought to counter anxiety and depression by designing clothes that would be light and liberating. Parachute material, sourced from an Italian mill specializing in technical fabrics, offered timely inspiration. As she manipulated it, the designer realized that the material could resemble flowers, poppies in particular. The work of Robert Mapplethorpe attracted her, and from there down a rabbit hole she went, discovering along the way that the flower was a popular symbol of Palestinian resistance in the 1970s and ’80s.For spring, the twin ideas of poppies and parachutes resulted in some charming pieces that somehow managed to blend military references and nostalgia-tinged romance. A pointillist camouflage, for example, here appears as an asymmetrical cascade of a denim skirt or as an ample top with an origami-like flower detail. A new iteration of a house signature, a fitted dark green jacket with barrel sleeves, and a couple of shirred off-the-shoulder tops looked simple yet special. So did some poppy-hued numbers in varying degrees of sheer, for example a parachute skirt trailing harness details or a shirtdress with a tulle overskirt embroidered with droopy blooms. A short draped white dress with a low-slung black cummerbund resembled a deflated variation on the Limi dress that Chloé Sévigny chose for a red carpet appearance last summer, which doubled as a pre-release nod to the costumes Merhej produced for the actress’s latest film,Bonjour Tristesse.Considering the global context and the size of the Renaissance Renaissance team—Merhej, her mother, a seamstress, and goodwill from all over—spring also offers up an object lesson in agility and resilience. “For me, success is less a financial question than one of doing right by the environment, making sure the people on the team are happy, and making interesting, creative products,” the designer said.
By that measure alone, this outing was a win.
30 October 2024
Like many designers working today, Cynthia Merhej has been grappling with big questions in the run-up to presenting her fall offering. What does it mean to show a fashion collection against a backdrop of war? Where is the line between personal opinion and brand statement? Having spent the last four months in Lebanon, where her family is based, and where her mother produces Renaissance Renaissance clothes in her atelier in Beirut, tensions in the Middle East and the situation in Gaza have weighed heavily. “All I could think about was absurdity, the performative-ness of violence,” she said. “I don’t like literal references, but I started looking at images of clowns.”Just as clowns mine sadness for comic potential, so Merhej took in their turn-of-the-century wardrobe of shrunken blazers with blooming shoulders, overblown pants and ruffs, and mixed them with shredded sequins, faux leather and her signature experimental tulle to deliver an evocative play on proportion and shape. “I wanted to take frivolous elements like ruffles and sequins and rip them apart, making them tattered,” she said, holding up a pair of tulle hot pants appliquéd with raw-edged, toile-canvas ribbons.It’s not hard to see why stylists love her clothes: all-layered up, the looks have a theatrical quality that makes an instant impact. But they also work in isolation, and for the everyday. A khaki shirt with adjustable bows that gather in the fabric to create ruching on the hips exemplified Merhej’s simple-but-special approach. Her designs are the kind of thing you reach for on a Saturday night when you need to look like you’ve made an effort–but not too much of an effort.For fall, she experimented with Japanese faux leather for the first time, creating an alluringly feminine take on a bomber jacket with a gathered tulip hem. Merhej also debuted knitwear, a collaboration with Bielo, a second-generation Spanish supplier that uses Japanese knitting techniques. Tube skirts came with gathered hips, while cashmere cardigans sported slashes down their fronts to offset any bourgeois leanings. And she pushed on with shoes, creating patent ballerinas with raw-edged ribbon ties and boots for the first time.The changes Merhej made to the business last year, scaling things back and focusing on nurturing key retail relationships, have paid dividends. This collection felt like a step forward, with subtle details lending quirk and charm. Despite the news cycle, Merhej seems happier, too.
“It feels much better when you know your clothes are going somewhere where they’re going to be well-displayed, well-received, given attention and care,” she said. “The human element is really important for me. I prefer to stay small and stable.”
1 May 2024
At times, the designer Cynthia Merhej has cursed the phoenix-like name she gave her fledgling label when she was starting out in 2016. In some senses it has left her feeling trapped and unable to throw in the towel—beginning again seems a foregone conclusion when your label is named after an act of rebirth, doubled for emphasis. And she really had wanted to pack it all in earlier this year, owing to particularly complicated circumstances she is unable to disclose that left her struggling to exert control over her label and to make ends meet.When even highly established fashion houses are faltering, it’s unsurprising that emerging designers are tapping out of fashion’s rat race. Happily for Merhej’s fans—of whom there are many, and a discerning bunch they are too—she persisted. Currently based between Paris and Beirut, the Lebanese designer has recently come out the other side of a period of reviewing, revising, and refining. She has sought out suppliers and factories in Lebanon to assist her mother (who has her own atelier in her basement in Beirut) with production. She has reworked all her patterns and fine-tuned the fit of her existing garments. She has scrutinized her best-received designs to date and rejuvenated them, and rejigged her wholesale relationships to favor physical over digital stores. (“I have online fatigue,” she said.) And she has found the time to develop shoes: sleek leather ballet slippers with sporty rubber soles, made at a family-owned factory in Lebanon, and embellished with silk bows she hand makes in her mother’s atelier.Her spring collection was beautifully put together, styled for the lookbook by Claudia Sinclair. But it’s when one analyses the pieces individually on the rack that one appreciates the thought and skill that has gone into each item. “I wanted everything to be able to be layered over everything else,” Merhej explained. “And I wanted to make everything really wearable, so that even our signature tulle skirts didn’t look too pouf-y and princessy, but could be worn every day, maybe even over jeans.
” The highlights: neat little military-style, technical-twill blazers that segue into delicate tulle trims; a dove grey, bubble-hemmed mini dress in a sportswear taffeta that can be layered over knits or worn against the body; gathered tulle skirts, shirts and dresses that form a clever contrast with beautifully cut cotton shirts; layered cotton day-dresses with charming little bows and fastenings; cropped cardigans with slashed backs and trailing tulle ribbons embroidered with lines of poetry by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.Of the latter, she said: “I just loved how they were able to talk about these very difficult subjects, sometimes violent, in a very soft, beautiful way.” For spring, Merhej had envisioned a protesting woman, walking on the street with white banners flying behind her. “I wanted to mix the idea of something that feels a bit more crisp and structured with a lot of softness, lightness and fragility,” she said. “I felt like I had to be a warrior, I had to keep going, and at the same time I felt inside like I was gonna crack!” She’s right to pour her vulnerability into her clothes. After all, it lent the collection a romance far more powerful than anything a marketing department could have dreamt up.
3 October 2023
Last season, Cynthia Merhej told us the story of a runaway princess searching for a life of her own making. For fall, the Renaissance Renaissance designer continued that story, imagining her heroine weathering the winter months in a makeshift wardrobe made of pre-existing and new materials. But as conductive as that narrative is to Merhej’s own storytelling, the most compelling story she has to tell is her own.The Lebanese designer is continuing her search for balance after the tragedy that struck her hometown of Beirut in 2020, and the past few seasons have seen her hold on to her work as a sort of beacon. Merhej went from the stability of designing and producing her collections in Lebanon in the studio and atelier she runs alongside her mother to creating from her home away from home in Paris, to finding balance and rhythm in working in between both cities.“This season I started playing with this idea of transformational garments,” Merhej said during a visit to theVogueoffices in New York, “I was looking again at the lifestyle of this princess, who may be too poor to buy two dresses so she makes something she can get more wear out of.” The personal side of that story, however, is that Merhej was looking to reconnect with her own sense of playfulness and independence in creating after a period of unresolvedness and evolution.The piece opening this lookbook is a deadstock pinstripe vest with a stylized cape, which unbuttons from the collar to become a bubble-hem train. This idea is replicated in a sweetheart neckline LBD, its capelet romantically tied around the neck, and on an upcycled fur stole worn as a strapless top. Merhej used mink fur from a vintage coat for some of these special pieces, paneling the material for the stole or dividing it in thin strips to use as accents in a gauzy silk skirt or wool double-breasted A-line coat. “The woman I’m designing for is very free,” Merhej said, “she doesn’t want to be tied down to anything, she’s experimental and playful.” As much as her convertible designs—most part of her Atelier program, which consists of one of a kind pieces—adhere to this ideal, it’s in her ready-to-wear that the designer is truly bridging the gap between her storytelling and her customer. A blush pink skirt and top set, as well as a khaki tailored jacket with matching skirt, were hits amongst my colleagues for their playful wearability.
“The idea of collaboration is really important to me,” said Merhej, “including a collaboration with whoever gets the piece and is free to wear it in their own way.” This is just the kind of play that will help Merhej and her collections find the balance she’s after.
27 February 2023
Picture this: A rebellious princess running away from her palace by the sea. She’s traversing the desert at dusk, desperately seeking a city where she’ll meet artists, writers, poets—free spirits who will release her own and unfetter her from the rigidity of tradition. This is the story Lebanese designer Cynthia Merhej conceived of while working on her spring collection for Renaissance Renaissance.You may ask yourself,A princess, really? For a brand called Renaissance?But this princess is detached from European traditions. Rather, she comes from Tunisia or Morocco, she’s running away to a place like Cairo, and her path is guided not by European medieval signage, but by Jinns and Arab symbols (as illustrated by a print, shown here in look 12, created by a friend of the designer’s and inspired by the mythology of the Arab desert).“I wanted to go back to the root of the brand, back to my narrative roots as a storyteller,” Merhej said over Zoom from Paris, where she hosted a presentation in her home, “I always found it easier to express very complicated ideas in a simplified way, a simple story,” she added. The complicated idea du jour? “The brand is about this tension between tradition and wanting to be a free spirit,” Merhej said, referring to her mother and herself as an example of this push and pull, but noting this dichotomy can also exist within one person.Merhej’s lineup for spring includes a recently launched category called Atelier, under which she’ll produce one-of-a-kind pieces. Each garment is made in Beirut in her atelier using couture techniques. Merhej said that now that she’s established the commercial portion of her business, she wants to make sure she continues to push herself creatively, while at the same time finding ways of nurturing the decimated fashion industry in Beirut, currently in a state of rebuilding. The pieces are also sustainable in that they’re made from deadstock materials—“they can’t just be self-indulgent, you know?” she said.The first of these pieces opens the lookbook: a naturally dyed cropped cardigan knitted in a large gauge with mohair and tulle yarn by Lindsey Smith, a collaborator. “The idea was to create these kinds of knits that look like they’re degrading, the leftovers of her dress that was falling apart,” Merhej said in reference to her princess and her arduous journey. Another piece is made by hand layering pieces of lace her mother has been collecting for 25 years.
The most striking item in the collection is a reversible coat as seen in looks 3, 7, and 9. One face is taffeta, and the other is covered in gathered tulle (a signature of Merhej). The coats underwent a few experiments like tea dyeing or sun drying, all to give them the texture and softness of a lived-in piece.Elsewhere, in the ready-to-wear, Merhej explores her tulle fabrications, most notably on a skirt made of cotton and covered in tulle, which she also designed attached to a ribbed knit top as a dress. Other highlights include ankle-length linen skirts (which carefully walk the line between truerenaissanceandrenaissance, reimagined), a pleated button-down shirt fitted at the waist (a common focal point in Merhej’s work), and a rounded kimono-sleeve tailored jacket, which is returning from last season given its success. As Merhej continues to expand her ready-to-wear commercially, it will serve her well to apply the same sensibility of cut to the more subtle pieces of the collections.
7 October 2022
Renaissance Renaissance designer Cynthia Merhej joined our Zoom call from her parents’ house in Beirut. She’d recently relocated to her hometown after moving to Paris during the pandemic, which was just a few months after the explosion that devastated the Lebanese capital on August 4th, 2020. To say the past, give or take, three years have been plagued with conflict is an understatement, but seeing the work that is coming out of those singular experiences can help put things into perspective.Merhej is the third generation in a family tree of fashion designers and makers. Her great grandmother used to have an atelier in Palestine, as did her mother in Beirut (“it kind of skipped a generation,” she says), and now her. “I grew up understanding the power and craft behind clothes and the impact they have on a daily life,” she says, adding that she always planned on working with her mother, but she wanted to make sure that if she entered the business of fashion she’d truly have something to offer.“I come from four generations of war and loss,” she says, “I want to make something that lasts, things that are considered. I don't really come at all from Western society where it's normal to consume and throw away, that's very foreign to me,” she adds. For this reason her collections are small, focused, and developed with her mother and a small team of seamstresses in Beirut. Well, all except for this one; fall 2022 was developed while Merhej lived in Paris after the explosion and during the pandemic, away from her team, space to work, and lacking of her usual process. Merhej describes this delivery in two ways during our conversation, both earnest but dissimilar in demeanor. First as “the collection that came at the most turbulent time in my life,” which she says solemnly, and then as “the nervous breakdown collection,” which she delivers with a laugh. Both descriptors are equally valid, and both are the mark of a person who has evolved through turmoil with the self deprecating humor that is so common these days in our generation.For fall, Merhej looked for softness in cut and materials, which came alive in her use of gathered tulle, the balloon hems in her skirts, and the rounded sleeves in her tailored jackets (deliciously achieved by cutting the style in a curved kimono sleeve pattern, avoiding the need for an armhole).
She tells me that her inspiration often comes from construction rather than aesthetic ideation, which becomes evident once she tells me that this time around she fixated on the circular form — most of her cutting and construction details revolve around curved or circular patterns. “I really needed softness after telling myself to keep going for so long,” she told me. Merhej has a talent (and one could say inherited skill) for making distinct but very wearable clothes. The collection was at its most believable when she leaned into its most paired down elements. The tailoring, shirting, jackets, and even the tulle strapless dresses and mini skirts will all likely find happy homes in her customers’s closets.Now that she’s back in Beirut, she says things are still not easy but that folks have adapted, as most living in conflict tend to do, and she is happy to be there. “It’s important to me to be here, not only for my process but for the country,” she says, “so many people have left, including myself, and I now have no friends here. It’s important to be here and keep some kind of creative energy going.”
17 August 2022
What is fashion for? Pandemic and post-pandemic life has skewed the answer to this question dramatically in favor of purpose; a garment must be functional to have a place in your wardrobe. In some cases, purpose is good—most of us have had a pair of sweats and a cozy dress enter our lives over the past 15 months. In others, usefulness is shoehorned into collections under the guise of beauty. Now, even the expression of joy has a certain purposeful ring:Soon, you will be free—and you better dress like it.Cynthia Merhej’s Renaissance Renaissance collection has taken a much more artistic, human form over the past year. Rather than try to paint some easy-to-digest narrative over her clothing, she cut to the chase on a Zoom call: Things have been bad, traumatic. Her life was upended not only by the pandemic but by Beirut’s tragic explosion last August. Afterwards, she moved to Paris alone in the midst of France’s lockdown, then she moved her production to Italy. Many of her new colleagues were only faces on a screen and many of her fittings were happening on WhatsApp.The beauty of Merhej’s work is that she designs from this experience rather than around it. In trying to make sense of the past year, she has pushed juxtaposed ideas to the fore. The softness of her bubble skirts and rosy pink palette clash against mannish pinstripe tailoring and austere white separates. Lebanese and Arab traditional dress continues to inform the free, rounded shapes of pieces like her black gathered trousers and tie-front jackets, but they are contrasted with the formality of pieces like a corset that cinches a silky pleated dress. New ideas have crept into the collection in small ways, among them the side-buttoned draped skirts, thin micro knits with sheer pouf shoulders, and bi-colored skirts with a scarf-like draped panel. How will these garments fit into your wardrobe? The answer is one that’s for you to experiment with and discover on your own. After a lot of prescriptive ideas of fashion’s purpose, a bit of elegant uncertainty is refreshing.
22 June 2021
Sustainability has taken many forms in the collections shown during this pandemic year. There are recycled materials, fewer looks, more ethical production. Cynthia Merhej’s brand Renaissance Renaissance has all that, plus the complete absence of all zippers and buttons. Over a Zoom call from Paris, where she moved in haste from Lebanon in the weeks following the tragic explosion in Beirut, Merhej explained that she was struck by the fact that while fabrics might have a second life after a garment is recycled, it’s the fastenings that often end up in the trash.Removing all plastic, metal, or wood closures in favor of ties and knots has done wonders for her creativity. The bulbous, elongated silhouettes that first brought her success are even more dramatic when tied with a ribbon or draped into a wrap coat. In saturated pinks and reds, Merhej’s dresses and skirts have an exuberance and optimism to them without being overly saccharine. She also offers a wide range of separates in neutral tones inspired by Algerian, Ottoman, and Lebanese garments. Here, there is a more practical, wearable side to her work, with blouson culottes, ruffled tuxedo shirts, and caramel-color suits strewn with ties. For every feminine bow, Merhej counterbalances a mannish shoulder or tweed.In leaving traditional fastenings behind, Merhej has made her work open to more sizes and body types. The idea that more people of every shape and gender could slip into Renaissance Renaissance is invigorating her to continue thinking differently as she and her small team—just her mother and a patternmaker—begin work on their next season. This collection proves that even in the wake of unspeakable tragedy, creativity survives.
26 January 2021