Cynthia Merhej’s brand Renaissance Renaissance is all about rebirth. When Merhej started the label from her home city of Lebanon in 2016, the moment was a bit of a renaissance for the designer herself. Merhej grew up in her mother’s atelier, but as she reached her teenage years, a sense of disillusionment set in—she struggled to equate her homegrown view of the industry with the greater fashion world, which thrived outside of Lebanon’s borders. “I had a weird schism growing up, seeing fashion in these two very different ways,” she tells W over Zoom. After heading to London for school, set on following a different creative path, she found herself returning to Beirut, picking up where her mother—and her great-grandmother before that—left off.
Now, Merhej uses her brand to bridge the fractured view of fashion that plagued her youth. Renaissance Renaissance has a distinctly dichotomous feel, mixing old-world, romantic silhouettes with more modern sensibilities. Skirts of tulle with a French Revolution tilt feature dangerously high slits only a woman of the 21st century would dare to take on. Tailored jackets taper in like a corset and bloom at the shoulders with an ’80s flair. Looking through Merhej’s collections, there’s a sense of traveling back in time, of following a woman through life’s journeys. A trained illustrator, Merhej sees the world through storytelling and characters, and Renaissance Renaissance tells the story of a woman, her evolution, and her own rebirths.
“I recently realized this character I created is the woman I want to be,” Merhej says of her imaginary muse. “It’s the side of myself I repressed for a very longtime.” Growing up in Lebanon during the final years of the country’s civil war, Merhej didn’t always feel she had the ability to act with complete freedom. “As a child, you’re experiencing trauma, but it’s a secondhand trauma,” Merhej recalls. At the time of Merhej’s childhood, an objective…
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