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By Hiba Ali
“My generation is wide awake, aware that it’s time to take back what’s ours. That the grass may never be greener anywhere” - Excerpt from the Neverland fashion film.
Beirut based Emergency Room presented their Spring-Summer 2022 ready to wear collection with a nostalgic memento to Beirut’s golden era, the 60s and 70s. Presented at Arab Fashion Week, the film is a self reflection of Lebanon’s youth and a love letter to a glorious past that they’ve only heard stories of. The captivating dreamy aesthetic of the film opens with scenes of a carefree summer spent on beaches, basking in the golden light. Flickering between modern day scenes, it expresses scattered thoughts of the youth, as it shows different people getting ready to go out after long periods in confinement and lockdowns.
Entitled Neverland the collection is a tribute to the past, but also to a generation caught between what was and what could be. With it’s vintage inspired, one of a kind pieces, made with up-cycled and dead stock fabrics, the brand has proven sustainability is the future and has the ability to create something original from the discarded. The logo of the collection is the bootleg version of the Mercedes Logo often found in Lebanon on trucks and designed by Egyptian graphic designer Amro Thabit. The logo is featured on the back of t-shirts, a cultural symbol but also shows Emergency Room’s inventiveness in fashion.
The collection features tailored patchwork pants, long raglan sleeve t-shirts and utilises up-cycled printed jersey t-shirts to create new ones. The process of finding, adapting and making carefully curated pieces is the DNA of Emergency Room. While each collection sets to capture a particular theme, Neverland truly sets out to define a sentiment of highs and lows, moments of disappointment and longing for the past but more importantly gives hope and represents a resilience that speaks to the cultural shift felt by an entire generation. This can be seen in the muted tones of the collection with fragments of vibrant hues in a shirt made entirely of salvaged scarves or gold embroidered pants and jackets made of traditional jacquard bedsheets and linens. Neverland seeks to pay homage to a lost era but in doing so creates its own artistic force that sets out to redefine and reclaim what was lost.
