Osama Chabbi: The Eye That Listens

Some people watch fashion. Others read it. Osama Chabbi belongs to the second category  the rarest, the most valuable. Founder of Reviewed by Osa, an interview platform dedicated to the creative minds of the industry, he has built in just a few years something genuinely singular: a space for thought in a landscape saturated with instant reactions and disposable opinions.

What makes Osama so distinctive starts with his background. Before fashion, there was geopolitics. A path that might seem paradoxical  but one that explains everything. His gaze is not that of a fan, nor even a connoisseur. It is the gaze of an analyst. "The socio-political context is the backdrop of a fashion show," he says. And when he describes Demna's Gucci show in Times Square as a "brutal portrait of an America losing its dream," you understand that for him, a collection is never just a collection.

The Art of Saying Nothing  Before Saying Everything

Osama Chabbi does not believe in instant opinions. He watches a show. Then he watches it again that same evening. Sometimes a third time. This deliberate slowness traces back to Oum Kalthoum  whose music filled the air in his grandmother's home  and to her songs, which only let her voice in after twelve minutes of instrumental introduction. "There is a beauty in contemplation, in waiting, in silence before you begin."

A philosophy that cuts sharply against the relentless pace of social media, and one that Reviewed by Osa embodies to its core. His ritual before attending a show? Not talking about fashion. "I like to arrive with an empty mind."

An Obsessive Visual Grammar

What fewer people know is that Osama is also the artistic director of his own interviews. He chooses the chairs, signs off on every frame, oversees the colorimetry  "I direct the edits, I don't edit myself," he clarifies and once rehearsed a Kim Kardashian shoot down to a two-and-a-half-minute countdown. On his sets, which bring together between ten and fifteen people, the composition rarely changes: the subject seated on the right, Osama standing on the left, same outfit, same light, same ceiling height. He only takes the seat on the right on rare occasions, almost exclusively for women  Amina Muaddi, Michèle Lamy, Pelagia Kolotouros among them.

"When I started, I realised I had a very archaic vision of the interview format  not in a negative way, but in the sense that my approach was far more traditional than entertainment, which felt old-fashioned to others. And by owning it, I understood what truly mattered to me."

He describes himself, with disarming candour, as "a psychopath." The kind who tests chairs for squeaks. Who keeps a spare pair of black socks in his kit, because you never know. Who, on the Victoria Beckham shoot, had exactly one window to get it right  and did.

Encounters That Change a Gaze

Reviewed by Osa has welcomed Michelle Lamy, Kim Kardashian, Jacquemus, Victoria Beckham, Willy Chavarria. Each time, Osama arrives with the same conviction: that humanising a creator is the only way to truly understand their work.

He remembers Michelle Lamy, as they were about to sit down, asking him: "What is so important to say that it requires us to take a seat?" A gentle slap. An invitation to reconsider the whole exercise. "It almost made me feel that the moment we were trying to capture was very superficial compared to the human exchange she had in mind."

And perhaps that is the heart of the project: not to capture figures, but to document presences.

Heritage as a Compass

There is something deeply rooted in family memory running through Osama's journey. For Osama, Alaïa became a tutelary figure. "My spiritual grandfather." Not merely a symbol of success, but a symbol of rigour, discipline, and possibility  for everyone who comes from a world that does not predestine them to fashion. "He was the man who represented what was possible to me." That invisible thread between origin and ambition, between what we inherit and what we build, runs through everything he does.

What Football Taught Him About Fashion

On a match night in Paris, his first real experience of the city's collective fever, he noticed something nobody else seemed to be looking at: the way people had woven jerseys and fan scarves into their outfits. "It's a real fashion moment. It's democratic fashion, but it remains divided." A project is underway. He cannot say more just yet.

The Impossible Interview

If he could sit across from anyone, living or dead, it would be Alaïa, not to talk about his dresses, but to ask the one question no one ever asked: Did you know you were a living myth? And if he ever had to write a break-up letter to a designer? To Demna, perhaps. Not out of indifference, but because break-up letters are only written to those you truly loved.

On Desperate Housewives and the Timeless

Ask Osama about his favorite TV series, and the answer arrives without hesitation: Desperate Housewives. "It marked me for life," he says, with the kind of warmth usually reserved for the most cherished of memories. His fascination with Bree Van de Kamp, fastidious, armoured, endlessly contradictory, says something about the way he sees people: as constructions, as characters, as the sum of what they reveal and what they conceal. "Each of those women had a piece of us," he reflects. "They are the image of many things we all carry."

It is a small detail, perhaps. But it is a revealing one. Because Reviewed by Osa, at its best, operates on exactly that principle: finding, in a designer, a show, or a conversation, the fragment of universal truth hiding inside the specific. The Wisteria Lane of fashion criticism, you might say  polished on the surface, extraordinarily complex underneath.

In ten years, Reviewed by Osa may look different. But it will still be a platform where opinions and ideas meet. He is certain of it. And listening to him speak with the precision of a lawyer, the warmth of a storyteller, and a joyful seriousness that never takes itself too seriously  so are you.