‘At first I was very angry at the people who left but I have a foreign passport and they don’t

One of Lebanon’s most in-demand fashion designers, Eric Mathieu Ritter uses discarded materials found in souks to create his clothes. His label, Emergency Room, is thriving in spite of a turbulent start, with an outlet in Beirut and an international clientele boosted by appearances at fashion weeks around the Middle East and in Europe. “We often talk about the first five years of a business as being the hardest, and I think mine were particularly complicated,” he says. “It can only be better from now on.”

Ritter, 29, studied fashion in Beirut and interned in Paris, but grew disillusioned with the industry and ended up working with underprivileged women in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, “teaching them how to sew, knit and embroider and building a small cooperative”. This led in 2018 to the formation of Emergency Room. He now employs 20 people.

Ritter counts himself lucky that he had one good year of business before the current wave of crises. When Covid struck, his company started making fabric face masks out of upcycled materials. The dire economic situation prompted him to focus more on selling abroad, and when the Beirut blast damaged their physical store in 2020, they had an online shop ready to go. “Being young,” he says, “it was easier for us to adapt each step of the way.”

Unlike many of his friends who have abandoned Lebanon in the past few years, leaving “was never really a thought for me”, says Ritter, who also heads up the fashion department at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. “At first, I was very angry at the people who left but you’ve got to realise that whereas I have the privilege of having a foreign passport, they don’t. For them, it’s a way of securing whatever future they could get. It’s this harsh realisation that this is not an OK country, not a secure country, not a country that cares about your future.”