Resistance Chic

As if life in Lebanon isn't strange enough: the capital is in the midst of a terrorist bombing campaign, there's a militant Islamist uprising still going on in a Palestinian refugee camp up North, and in Southern Lebanon, United Nations peacekeepers have themselves become targets for terrorists. But in the midst of all this, there is apparently still room for yet another designer clothing boutique in Beirut.

Last night was the opening of a store called Guerilla in a semi-rennovated Ottoman-era townhouse in East Beirut a few blocks away from chez Butters. Despite the fact that it carries nothing but Comme Des Garcons, a Japanese hipster label with a French name, the store is supposed to be some kind of underground statement about Resistance -- against radicalism, against totalitarianism, against bad taste -- against pretty much anything which would prevent good looking people from having a good time. The Guerilla building, which will be open for only one year, is hidden away on an small side street, has cinder block display tables, and an unfinished, peeling interior that makes it feel like some kind of civil war safe house, albeit one with a mirror on the ceiling in the shape of a giant AK-47 assault rifle.

It would be impolite for me to keep making fun of Guerilla, considering I didn't mind "covering" the event and chatting up some of the pretty young bohemians who were making the scene. And after all, what else are you going to do if you are young and restless and and living in a country which the world's major powers want to turn into a battlefied? At least the Guerilla girls saved an historic building from destruction, opened a new business, and threw a good party. Unfortunately, no amount of good taste is going to save Lebanon from the major buzz kill that awaits it.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut