We Asked, We Listened: Strengthening Practice and Opportunity Across Lebanon's Fashion Community
What do young designers actually need to build sustainable careers in Lebanon's fashion industry? And what are employers looking for when they hire them?
These questions have been at the heart of CSB's forthcoming public program, Beyond the Studio: Fashion Practice & Professional Growth Masterclasses, delivered in partnership with GIZ and the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs (MoSA). It is funded by Germany (BMZ). The initiative is designed to help fashion designers, practitioners, and creatives strengthen their practice and access new opportunities, reaching CSB alumni as well as emerging talent across Lebanon's wider fashion community.
The program is now moving from the research and development phase into outreach and implementation. But before reaching this stage, we began by asking the people navigating the industry every day what they need, rather than building the program around assumptions.
A Growing Market, Uneven Opportunity
Lebanon's creative economy is already substantial. Economic research accompanying the country's 2026–2031 Cultural and Creative Industries Strategy estimates that the sector employs around 166,000 people and generates approximately $1.1 billion in exports. Yet an estimated 30 to 40% of its workers operate informally, reflecting a lack of regulation, institutional support, and long-term protection for creative labour, according to reporting on the Ministry of Culture's research.
The Gulf matters within this picture because it has long been a major market for Lebanese fashion and design. Research into Lebanon's design economy found that many local design businesses produce high-end, limited-edition work for top-tier clients in the Gulf. In 2024, personal luxury sales across the GCC grew by 6% to reach $12.8 billion, even as the global market contracted by 2%, according to Chalhoub Group's GCC Personal Luxury 2024 report.
This regional momentum represents real potential for Lebanon's fashion sector, but market growth does not automatically produce broad or equitable opportunity. The contrast between a commercially expanding regional market and the precarity experienced by many creative workers in Lebanon raises an important question: how can this growth translate into better opportunities, fairer access, and more sustainable professional pathways for the people working beyond the industry's most visible names?
Asking the People Navigating the Industry
Over several months, CSB conducted an Employer Needs Assessment, speaking with 19 industry professionals across 16 interviews. Together, they represented established maisons, international fashion companies, small ateliers, retail brands, and social enterprises. We mapped more than 130 fashion-sector entities operating in Lebanon and compared 13 fashion education programs across the country.
We also sat down with eight CSB alumni currently working in the industry for an in-depth conversation about what happens after graduation: how young designers find work, adapt to the workplace, and encounter professional demands that design school does not always prepare them for.
Across these conversations, the assessment pointed to a clear gap between the talent entering the industry and the combination of technical, digital, and commercial capabilities employers require. Lebanon produces an estimated 100 to 120 fashion design graduates each year, yet many employers described difficulty finding people with the skills their businesses need, particularly in pattern making, tailoring, sewing, and atelier production.
The Gap Between Education and Employment
This points to a wider challenge within Lebanon's fashion labour market. Opportunities exist, but they are often distributed across small teams and businesses in which roles overlap, resources are limited, and employees are expected to contribute across several stages of the process. In this environment, creative talent remains essential, but it must often be combined with production knowledge, digital fluency, commercial awareness, adaptability, and an understanding of how a fashion business operates.
Our alumni described the other side of this gap.
Many spoke about entering an industry where young designers are expected to be generalists, moving between design, production, marketing, communication, and other responsibilities. They described a job market that still relies heavily on personal networks and word of mouth, limited entry-level opportunities, and workplaces where roles and responsibilities are not always clearly defined.
Their experiences also revealed a disconnect between how fashion is often taught and how it is practised. Education may focus primarily on developing creative identity and design skills, while the workplace requires young practitioners to understand timelines, production systems, client communication, teamwork, sourcing, business realities, and the movement of a product from concept to market.
The transition from education to employment is therefore not simply a matter of finding a first job. It involves learning how to operate within an entire professional ecosystem.
What Would Better Prepare Young Designers?
Professional readiness is not only about producing good design. It also requires an understanding of customers, markets, pricing, costing, and the commercial decisions that determine whether a product or business can be sustained. These are also among the qualities that help employers distinguish between someone who is talented and someone who is ready to work professionally: able to understand a brief, communicate effectively, work within budgets and timelines, and respond to real market needs.
Alumni also told us what would have better prepared them.
They wanted longer, more immersive internships and opportunities to contribute to real industry work rather than simply observe it. They wanted to experience the development of a collection from concept through production. They also identified areas where further learning would make a tangible difference:
Marketing and social media management
Advanced pattern making
CAD and digital fashion illustration
Leadership and people management
Fashion entrepreneurship
Practical and ethical uses of AI
3D design and printing
Sourcing and materials
PR and industry systems
Digital skills emerged not simply as an additional training need, but as part of a broader shift in what it means to be professionally capable in fashion. Digital tools now shape how designers develop and communicate ideas, manage production, present their work, reach audiences, and respond to changing markets. Building digital fluency is therefore increasingly connected to employability, adaptability, and the ability to participate fully in contemporary fashion practice.
These findings have directly shaped the professional development component of Beyond the Studio through a series of practical masterclasses for emerging and working creatives. Several of the areas identified by alumni now feature within the program, translating what we learned through the assessment into concrete opportunities for further learning and professional growth.
Skills Are Only Part of the Picture
The assessment also reinforced that skills alone are not enough. Access to the industry matters. Recruitment remains largely informal and network-driven, creating an additional barrier for talented young people who do not already have professional connections. When opportunities depend on who someone knows, unequal access to networks can reinforce existing social and economic barriers, regardless of a person's ability or potential.
This is particularly important to CSB's mission. Scholarship-based education can open the door to learning, but building more equitable pathways into employment also requires access to networks, experience, mentorship, workplace knowledge, and meaningful professional opportunities.
At CSB, this understanding has long shaped how we work. Alongside its three-year fashion design program, CSB connects students with internships, industry collaborations, professional feedback, and opportunities to work on real commissions. Support continues after graduation through employment connections, commissions, collaborations, and other forms of alumni development.
Beyond the Studio offered an opportunity to formalize and expand something we have long understood through this work: that education must be accompanied by access, continued resources, professional experience, and sustained connections to the industry. By extending these opportunities beyond CSB's students and alumni to emerging and working creatives across Lebanon, the program aims to widen access to professional development and strengthen the pathways connecting talent, education, and employment.
Building a Stronger Bridge
Here, too, the conversations gave us reason for optimism. Most of the employers interviewed expressed a willingness to engage, whether through longer internships, mentorship, training, or other forms of collaboration. The interest is there. What is needed is a structure through which education and industry can work together more consistently.
For CSB, this is what evidence-led program development looks like: ask, listen, interpret, and build in response.
Beyond the Studio is one step towards creating a stronger bridge between creative education and professional life, shaped by the experiences of the young people entering the industry and the people who will eventually work alongside and employ them. More broadly, the findings suggest that strengthening Lebanon's fashion ecosystem will require closer collaboration between educators, employers, and practitioners, with learning continuing beyond graduation and extending into the workplace itself.
The talent is abundant. Our task is to ensure that the skills, networks, experience, and opportunities needed to sustain it are accessible.
#AdvancementandEmployabilityProgram is implemented by Creative Space Beirut and GIZ in partnership with the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs (MoSA). It is funded by Germany (BMZ) @germanyinlebanon.
