This guest of honour for the Grand Tour is an artist in the field of haute couture, a designer with his own fashion house: Rabih Kayrouz, famous throughout the world for dresses with a fluid, meticulous cut and a personal universe that is refined, delicate and poetic. Diptyque invited Kayrouz to create an artistic edition inspired by Byblos, a town he grew up near, that has fascinated him since childhood. “It was the only historic location I was able to visit back then. For me, this town has always been a place to dream. I would try to understand the way people lived there, back in ancient times. I have countless memories associated with the town, and plenty of fantasies too.”

For the occasion, the creator took the opportunity to work in ceramic. “I’m already sculpting materials and fabrics around the body for my dresses. But ceramic is a major first for me. I’m having fun with this new predilection.” His starting point: what would Desmond have brought back from Byblos? “To depart, then return with something tangible from your journey, never leaving that journey behind you. This is what I found really seductive about the way Desmond operated, and it matches the way I create: my inspirations come from stories or real-life situations.”

So inside a cedar wood box we find three small sculptures – the kind of artifacts that the founders of Diptyque might have brought back after visiting the town: a fragment of a model of a temple, a fossil of a poppy from nearby Adonis Valley where Rabih Kayrouz himself was born, and a golden fragment from a cedar crown that could have belonged to the King of Byblos, conceived as a tribute to the woods that the ancient world drew on to build the wonders of the world, transporting the cedars via Byblos, the world’s oldest port. Kayrouz has provided diptyque with his very own box of wonders, entitled Secretum (The Secret) – a box “with perfect angles, without any affectation, closed with a strand of lead”. One of the objects inside is perfumed with the Byblos scent conceived by Fabrice Pellegrin. “The directness and honesty of this perfume brought back countless memories,” says the artist, “especially the scent of coffee and cedar wood. For me, these are highly evocative of Lebanon.”