The top Western fashion designers suffered mostly when purses around the globe snapped resoundingly shut during the financial crisis.

However Lebanese designers, who hail from a land where Fashion TV is the channel of option at the swankiest bars, say they have managed to flee the impact of the crisis as of two things — affordable haute couture and rich Arab clients.

It’s fair to say that Lebanon just doesn’t do informal. High heels, form-fitting dresses and salon-styled hair are piece of various Lebanese women’s daily routine.

Renting a designer dress to wear at a wedding is far more satisfactory, than, horror of horrors, opting to purchase a common high-street gown.

So it’s no revelation that the country’s top designers became more famous for their complicated, long, sequined and chiffoned collections than classical ready-to-wear lines and their clientele continue coming back for more.

In fact Elie Saab, whose slinky, decidedly feminine dresses are a red-carpet beloved for numerous Hollywood A-listers, said his pret-a-porter lines suffered for a few months in the United States due to the crisis, and not his haute-couture lines.

Abed Mahfouz, whose clothes have been worn by Beyonce and Victoria Beckham, agrees.

Fiercely chic styles, musingly beautiful models, thumping music, designers basking in applause, and crowds dressed to make an impression they’re all part of Portland Fashion Week. The five-night event, which finished Sunday, showcased work by a variety of designers, from Portland to Paris.

The centerpiece of this year’s Fashion Week was the runway itself, which was collected of black solar panels afforded courtesy of one of Fashion Week’s sponsors, SolarWorld. Behind touring the Hillsboro manufacturing plant, Henderson went to work and came up with a crazily imaginative array of looks that made their debut at Saturday night’s runway show, at an industrial-chic space at Vigor Industrial Shipyards on Swan Island.

The Saturday show moreover featured spring/summer collections from Henderson’s fellow “Project Runway” veterans Gordana Gehlhausen, Jay Nicholas Sario and Jonathan Joseph Peters. But Portland Fashion Week wasn’t merely about TV-related glitz. The week’s lineup also featured Portland designers showing their substance in an installation-type format, also runway showcases for designers from Seattle, Portland and Bogota, Colombia-based designer Amelia Toro.