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Learn more about choosing dresses for petite figures here.
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Petite: Typically under 5' 4", petite women come in all shapes and sizes. See more than one category below that explains your body shape? Women are too unique for cookie-cutter molds, so have fun browsing them all and choosing your favorite looks! Explore these tips for each shape, as well as Simply Dresses’ selection of dress styles for complementing each silhouette. Either way, you are sure to find the formal dress or party dress that will make you look and feel beautiful. Shop for dresses by body type to find the ideal dress to enhance your shape or embrace your figure. You will save time and energy by shopping for styles that look good on your shape without the guesswork, cutting back on your need for returns or alterations. Knowing your particular body type can make shopping for cocktail dresses or formal dresses easier and more fun. It’s important to be here and keep some kind of creative energy going.Slender Why Shop Dresses by Body Type or Shape?ĭetermining your body type can help you find the formal dresses and short party dresses that are best designed for you. “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. 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. The tailoring, shirting, jackets, and even the tulle strapless dresses and mini skirts will all likely find happy homes in her customers’s closets. The collection was at its most believable when she leaned into its most paired down elements. Merhej has a talent (and one could say inherited skill) for making distinct but very wearable clothes. “I really needed softness after telling myself to keep going for so long,” she told me. 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. 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.įor 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).
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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. Merhej describes this delivery in two ways during our conversation, both earnest but dissimilar in demeanor. 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. For this reason her collections are small, focused, and developed with her mother and a small team of seamstresses in Beirut. 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. “I come from four generations of war and loss,” she says, “I want to make something that lasts, things that are considered. “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. 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. Merhej is the third generation in a family tree of fashion designers and makers. 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. 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. Renaissance Renaissance designer Cynthia Merhej joined our Zoom call from her parents’ house in Beirut.
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