Babu Lahoud was born in Habaleen, Jbeil district. Her mother, Françoise, who loved theater and music and had a wide musical culture, played the piano, and her talents and culture influenced her children. Her father, Raphael Lahoud, left Lebanon for Argentina and occupied the position of Minister of Information there, then returned to Lebanon in 1946, to be elected as a representative for Keserwan and Jbeil. In the same year, the family moved to Beirut, and Romeo moved to the Al-Hikma School, and there he met the drawing teacher, the artist Caesar Al-Jamil: “With him, I discovered my talents in drawing, and I began to follow all his exhibitions, and I made my decision to specialize in drawing.” As for Babu, who was born in 1950, and was seduced by lines and colors from a young age, she used to enter Romeo’s room, messing with his texts and drawing shapes and colors. She received her education or teachings at the Franciscan Sisters’ School in the Ashrafieh region, and she obtained the Lebanese and French baccalaureate degrees with distinction. In the school, she used to draw women in beautiful dresses, and her classmates obtained the largest part of these drawings of their dresses. And one day, according to Babu told the press, a nun was giving a religious lesson, and she was listening to it, but she was busy drawing one of the nuns, as she was thinking, what is that nun wearing? I put her on a swimsuit, and when she finished her drawing, she looked at it for a bit and was amazed at her creativity. However, the nuns in charge of her school did not accept her hobby of drawing, which led to her expulsion after drawing one of the nuns in a bathing suit.
“If it weren’t for my love of drawing, I would be a ballerina,” Babu told the Public Security magazine. At the age of fourteen, she began drawing fashion designs for a special page in Al-Hasnaa magazine, and provided women with instructions on how to choose appropriate clothes, adding, “because my father was a politician.” And he has a lot of acquaintances. One of his fellow journalists asked me to publish my designs in a well-known women’s magazine on four pages.”
In 1965, she reached the age of fifteen, and she was in the middle school certificate class. At that time, she had her first and distinguished experience in the world of art and fame, when Romeo, encouraged by Romeo, asked her to design folkloric costumes for his first play, “The Waterfall”, which was shown on the steps of Baalbek Castle. The singer Sabah participated in it. The press wrote at the time, with great admiration, about the young woman who introduced fashion design to Lebanon and the Arab world for the first time. Then she designed the costumes for the 1968 castle plays, Farman 1970, Festival 1971…”. At the beginning of the seventies, Romeo Lahoud returned to Baalbek, transferring to her drawers the play “Venice 80” under a new title “Festival”, introducing amendments to the texts and changing some songs. And in advance, Al-Sabouha, who appeared alongside Shushu (Hassan Aladdin), wore a new innovative shorts designed by Babu Lahoud.
In 1979, she designed folklore costumes for the play “Petra” by the Rahbani brothers, and then Fayrouz’s costumes for the “Olympic” concert in England, as well as historical folkloric costumes for Mansour Rahbani’s play “Summer 840″… But at the same time, she was designing the costumes for all of Romeo Lahoud’s plays, And “Under Zakour’s Care” by Raymond Jbara, ballet performances by Georgette Jbara, plays by Nabih Abu Al-Hassan (Shane’s Sisters), and the works of Romeo Lahoud by Salwa Al-Qatarib (Sinkaf Sankaf, Bint Al-Jabal, Oxygen, …). In 2012, she presented costume designs for the play “A Land of Gypsies” by Ghadi and Marwan Rahbani with Ghassan Saliba, after which she designed costumes for the play “We Offer You a Homeland” by Antoine Ghandour, and then with Romeo “The Way of the Sun”.
Regarding her dealings with Fayrouz and Sabah, she tells Anadolu Agency that “Fayrouz is aptly named, and she has a love for the color that bears his name, i.e. the turquoise color, and she knows very well what befits her. As for Sabah, she loves fashion and does not accept simple clothes, such as that of the poor, for example. Even if the role requires her to do so, she is disciplined and deals with love with everyone.
Babu’s design approach outside of theatrical works was also the result of coincidence, as she worked on designing evening and wedding dresses starting in 1974, after a girl asked for a dress for her wedding. After that, Sobha repeated designing wedding and evening dresses for Lebanese and Arab women (princesses). Babu’s business has expanded to include costumes for flight attendants, hosts, and pilots of Jordanian (Aley), Iraqi, and Sudanese airlines, Brunei Airlines, and Middle East Airlines (MEA), in addition to clothing for Lebanese tourism hostesses, Olympic Games players (1997) and Lebanese public security women, and cadres of a number of hotels. I also designed Republican Guard uniforms at the request of former President Amin Gemayel, inspired by history and the military, but these designs were not approved due to the security and political circumstances that accompanied Gemayel’s era.
