The last time that we had crossed Leila Menchari, hieratic brunette, with a low bun and piercing eyes, it was at the Grand Palais, in Paris during the opening "Hermès à tir-d'aile" devoted to memorable decorations that she had signed for over fifty years for the saddler. It was in November 2017, in the presence of Azzedine Alaia, his great friend, who disappeared two weeks later. Their two destinies were linked from Tunis which she encouraged her to leave in 1957 to work together in Paris, at Guy Laroche's, she as a model, him in the workshop.
Before, there is childhood in Tunis, well-off parents, a lawyer father and a mother court clerk, granddaughter of the last sultan of Touggourt, "the first woman to go out revealed like me, I was the first girl admitted to the Fine Arts of Tunis. She lectured against the veil and on emancipation, but we lived in the Arab city with the constraints of the Arab city. I wanted to leave, I did not want to enter this system of life ”, she confided three years ago to Madame Figaro .
The culture of beauty with Visconti and Cocteau
There is school with the Missionary Sisters of Africa in Carthage where she learns French. There are summers in Hammamet where she meets Violet and Jean Henson, a couple passionate about archeology and flowers, whose garden will leave a lasting mark on the teenager. In this paradise on earth, pass Visconti, Cocteau, Giacometti. Aesthetes who give birth to an artistic vocation in her.
She then succeeds in convincing her parents to let her fly to Paris and the School of Fine Arts where the girl is the pupil of Chapelain-Midy. She discovers the bohemian life of Saint-Germain in the 1950s, she dreams of theater sets. In 1957, she became a supermodel at Laroche, learning the codes of elegance of Parisian haute couture. At the age of 34, in 1961, she went to Hermès in search of a “food” job. But the years passed and the assistant of Annie Beaumel, the chief decorator, became the first designer, then, in 1978, responsible for the windows of the saddler. "I don't want to know anything before the curtain rises," said Jean-Louis Dumas, the charismatic president with whom she becomes a great accomplice. Until 2013, four times a year Menchari stages its unique, surrealist universe, between art and crafts, between East and West, the shop windows of 24 faubourg Saint-Honoré. Showcases open to the world, inseparable for several generations of French people, of the culture of the beautiful a little apart from the French saddler.
