beirut tailoring academy
A TUITION-FREE SCHOOL OF BESPOKE
SUSTAINING LEBANESE HERITAGE, EMPOWERING VULNERABLE YOUTH, AND RAISING THE VALUE OF LEBANESE TAILORING AND ITS TAILORS
Beirut Tailoring Academy (BTA) IS A QUINTESSENTIALLY SARTORIAL tuition-free school of bespoke offering three intensive tailoring programmes for youth AND YOUNG PERSONS hailing from disadvantaged socio-economic conditions.
BASED IN BEIRUT, BTA will bespeak a versatile environment that supports the revival of Lebanese sartorial tailoring, tailoring practices, and youth- and tailor-empowerment through the nurturing of a seamless network of students and Lebanese tailors whom the academy hires to become its in-house teachers;
Through practical, theoretical, and experiential approach to bespoke making, and an extensive support system from contributors in the fashion sector and bespoke experts, BTA tasks itself with engineering a tailoring ecosystem that promises its beneficiaries the tools necessary to navigate the folds of complex socio-political and economic conditions while maintaining and developing an enduring artisanal practice.
FREE-OF-CHARGE VOCATIONAL TRAINING →
SUPPORT SYSTEM for tailors
MASTER-TAILOR PROGRAMME
TROUSER MAKING PROGRAMME
SHIRT MAKING PROGRAMME
syllogos
THE CITY’S FABRIC
A TAILORED SILHOUETTE SEAMLESSLY SET AGAINST THE SURFACE OF THE CITY FABRIC AND THE FOLDS OF ITS HISTORY
A TAILORED SILHOUETTE SEAMLESSLY SET AGAINST THE SURFACE OF THE URBAN FABRIC and the folds of its history.
In the sartorial atmosphere of tailoring, every visual text permeated by the texture of the cloth is actual textile. Here we are reminded of what Gilles Deleuze had once termed a “texturology:” a philosophical and art-related conception in which solid surfaces - or better, façades or matter - are clothed in the sense that it is fabric, an enveloping texture. We can configure a fibrous form and relation between the visual representation and texturality of cloth and the dilapidated city walls and ruins of Beirut, clad and framed as dense as tapestry of color and marred fresco, the peeling layers of paint, patina, and time “sheets,” rendered even more textural by the ever-peeling and worn off - or better, worn in - fabric of old posters married to the city’s surface and walls, and are set against, and threaded to, the fabric of cloth, only to illustrate a visual tapestry like no other.
The city turns into a visual canvas that is actually “textural” as it emerges out of its saturated and haptic surfaces, where cloth turns into walls and walls into fabric.