Maison Rabih Kayrouz Spring 2024 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Rabih Kayrouz might have been taking a quieter approach to the season, staging his collection in a Left Bank showroom instead of holding a show. But in a way, he had as much to say as ever. For starters, having just been on the jury for Design Parade, which is the interior design and architecture component of the Festival d’Hyères, he noted how designers might spend a year on a chair, whereas a fashion collection might comprise something like 100 garments created every three months. “I like the idea of getting out of time,” he said. “I have to be free in a way to be able to think better.”

To accompany this collection, he wrote about the vision he had in his mind, which involved a woman waiting for her lover, perhaps wistfully at a port. He invoked the colors and the fabrics: satin, crepe, silk and cotton toile, charmeuse. He also conveyed the intimacy of wearing someone else’s clothing during their absence. “You are not far…”

And for the first time (at least in recent memory), he wanted the clothes to speak—quite literally. Black sheaths in gauzy tulle were embroidered with excerpts from Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Beau Navire” (The Beautiful Ship). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kayrouz was particularly captivated by the stanza that describes the lazy, slow rhythm of a sweeping skirt, which the poet compares to a ship at sea. But this piece wasn’t just poetic, it was clever; layered over several looks throughout the collection, it created a contained silhouette that brought intrigue to the words on the surface as well as what was underneath. You need not have read “Fleurs de Mal” to appreciate that he was rethinking how we signal sensuality.

If Kayrouz is passionate about capturing the poetic gestures of garments, he is also constantly considering their visual language. Here, these two expressions seemed to merge seamlessly: a dash of a vent splitting the side of a softly structured jacket; the undulating curve of a strapless, gently billowing black dress in a cross-hatched organza; the fluid neckline of a top that extends like a tail. It might sound counterintuitive for something to be both subtle and dramatic, yet Kayrouz arrived at a harmony that his admirers will appreciate and will recognize as distinct to him.

This season will be remembered for its vivid green tailoring: a suit with ties at the shoulder and trousers that descended with the smoothest flare. An equally vivid yellow took shape as a draped dress where the sleeves practically melted into the back. As the most direct allusion to the port story, there was a tuxedo reinvented as a sailor-style piece, the lapels converging as a plunging V.

As our time together overlapped with a visit from the imminent retailer (and Kayrouz’s longtime friend) Ikram Goldman, he pointed out how he wanted people to desire his designs for their wearability, not just their beauty. “I want people to wear my clothes. I want to bring poetry into the clothes, to bring new ideas. But if they are not worn, it’s as if you are doing beautiful food and no one is eating it.”