racha el abbas

Beirut-born designer Racha El Abbas was raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. At the age of eighteen she moved to Beirut to join the School of Architecture & Design at the American University of Beirut as an architecture student only to find herself drawn to the world of Graphic Design, experimenting with media and discovering new graphic and tactile textures.

After graduating in 2003, Racha soon joined the creative team at the global advertising firm, Leo Burnett. Her career as an Art Director came to an end after five years, when it was time to give the dream of making beautiful garments a shot. In 2008, Racha resigned her position and moved to Paris to fulfill this aspiration. With the hope to marry her Graphic design background with a rich fashion and textile design experience, she joined an intensive fashion design program at Parsons Paris where she discovered a great passion for experimental draping, surface treatment and the design of prints.

In 2010, at the turn of her thirtieth year, Racha decided to venture into designing a collection of garments she had conceptualized during her time at Parsons Paris, and now serves as an introduction to a lifelong research of textile design and surface treatment. She was selected to be a member of Starch to launch her first prêt-a-porter fashion collection. Her collections are inspired by a coupled study of contemporary architecture and fabric. Their forms dwell on structural rhythms and their surfaces tell a tale of prints imprinted with a bold graphic sense.