Reem Acra blends the boudoir, the vampiric, the vixenish, and the angelic into one astonishing collection.
Reem Acra is off to a solid start this year. As the chief mentor on the new Fashion Star series, she is tasked with guiding and informing a new generation of emerging Middle Eastern designers. But when she’s not busy doing that, she is hard at work making couture-level creations that are so beautiful as to practically defy description. For Fall/Winter 2016, Acra tweeted a vintage photo of her mother wearing her own couture dress with the following comment: “A hint of glamour from the past with a modern New York twist.” She followed that up by posting a photo of Erté’s famous ‘Manhattan Mary’. While a certain flapper-girl aesthetic could be elicited from her latest presentation, Acra so transformed the category that she forever changed the way we look at decadent dress by blending the boudoir, the vampiric, the vixenish, and the angelic into one seriously astonishing collection.
Acra’s work is a feat of design engineering worthy of awards.
Her dreamy, ethereal, fantasy collection needs to be seen up close to understand how the glittering straps of her gowns could conform so perfectly to the body. It’s a feat of design engineering worthy of awards. Her sparkling, lacy confections were electrified with tufts of contrast panels of chiffon, ruffled silk, sheer fabric, and netting, but never once was the silhouette drowned by her use of these couture fabrics. In fact, her pitch-perfect designs were so strong that she repeated the same style in varying colors of lilac, ice blue, lipstick red, lemon, and bronze pink before dallying in a different silhouette. In addition to her frothy frocks, she also created excellent column gowns that featured glittering ombré details and fluid dresses finished with diamanté halters that clasped the chest and throat. Her body-baring designs were racy without being raunchy – which is a rare quality indeed. Clients of this leading red-carpet designer just lucked into some of the best designs they’ll ever be fortunate enough to wear.
