2025 Fashion Show, Exhibition, and Celebration
In celebration of creativity and community.

We Have Arrived, We Are Home presents the thesis collections of Creative Space Beirut’s graduating class of 2025 – young designers whose education unfolded through some of the most challenging chapters in Lebanon’s recent history. Amid disruption and uncertainty, they continued to create, learn, and grow, weaving both personal stories and collective memory into their work.

This marks CSB’s first show since 2018 and unfolds as a full evening of creative celebration, exploring the intersection of fashion, storytelling, and space-making. Also on view are selected works by second-year students, offering a glimpse into the minds of the next wave of emerging talent, and a pop-up shop featuring CSB staples. All purchases directly support free design education and sustain the school’s mission.

The event honors the idea of arrival – into selfhood, into belonging, into a collective spirit. In a context marked by instability and crisis, this moment reminds us: home is not a place we find – it is something we build together, through creativity, persistence, and community.

This show is the culmination of a long and layered journey. Each student has walked their own path, at times alone, often together, always alongside the shared struggles of this place we call home. The class of 2025 experienced their education through constant interruption and upheaval: the October uprisings, economic collapse, a global pandemic, the Beirut port explosion, and, most recently, war. They’ve rebuilt their momentum each time it was interrupted, just as Lebanon continues to do.

From the hope and heartbreak of revolution to learning in isolation, from the loss of sanctuary to studying under falling bombs, every chapter of crisis has left its mark. And through it all, they showed up. They paused, adapted, pivoted, and persisted. They carried personal histories, grief, fear, and resilience while continuing to build a practice. That fight, and its triumphs, live in the collections before you.

At the heart of each piece is the act of arrival: arriving at a truth, a feeling, a memory, a sense of self. Not stillness, but recognition. A place you build. A place that builds you.

The title of this exhibition is drawn from a walking meditation by Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh: “I have arrived, I am home.” The phrase was often quoted by the late CSB co-founder and mentor, Caroline Shlala-Simonelli. We Have Arrived, We Are Home speaks to our students, and to all of us. It holds the feeling of returning after a long, uneven journey: changed, marked, but still here, and ready to begin again. In a reality that continues to test us, there is still this: a home we make through persistence, through creativity, through each other. A home for a collective soul that has endured – and still has made it home.