Leïla Menchari, the French-Tunisian maestro behind Hermès’s magical window displays for 35 years, died in Paris this weekend from the coronavirus. The news was confirmed by Carla Sozzani, a friend of Menchari as well as the founder of 10 Corso Como and the sister of the late Franca Sozzani, the longtime editor of Italian Vogue. Menchari was 93 years old.
Born in Tunis in 1927, Menchari began to create theater sets while studying at Beaux-Arts schools. That work became the backbone for her lifetime achievement—creating mesmerizing window displays for Hermès’s famed flagship store at 42 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Though the French luxury house, first founded in 1837 as a purveyor of equestrian equipment, had long been staging such vitrine-inclosed tableaus, Menchari’s work took such efforts to new heights, while helping to pioneer Hermès’s visual marketing strategy in the process.
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Menchari joined the brand in 1961, working under the head of windows at the time, Annie Beaumel. “When I first came to the house, luxury seemed slightly suspect to me,” Menchari later reflected of that period. “I was very independent. What I see [now was that it was the] most beautiful trap of my life.” In 1978, Menchari took over the reins of the department, beginning a remarkable tenure that would last until her retirement in 2013. But her title, chief window designer, belied her broader influence: Known for helping to select the house’s seasonal silk scarf color palettes, Menchari was later the subject of a documentary by French filmmaker Josée Dayan.
Perhaps more important, Menchari’s elaborate staging work helped further establish the brand as a ne plus ultra resource for far more than fashion accessories. An expert in creating decor-forward mise-en-scènes, Menchari reminded fans of the brand and window shoppers alike that Hermès was a world unto itself, synonymous with a no-expense-spared approach. The dreamlike fantasies she concocted—winter-white forests and Medusa-infused mirages from classical antiquity among them—signaled too that Hermès products were worthy of consumers’ own aspirations, a strategy broadly employed by luxury brands, if to a far less imaginative degree.
During Menchari’s lifetime, her legacy did not go unnoticed. In 2017, Paris’s Grand Palais staged a major exhibition of her work, titled “Hermès Takes Flight: The Worlds of Leïla Menchari.” Speaking at the time of the show’s opening, Axel Dumas, Hermès CEO and an Hermès family member, said, “Hermès wouldn’t be Hermès without Leïla.” For her own part, Menchari poignantly reflected to Vogue.com at the time: “Things that are made well never leave you indifferent.… I never think about the past. The important thing is to keep learning.”
Nonetheless, it is the words that Pierre-Alexis Dumas—the artistic director of the house and another member of the Hermès family—shared this week that might summarize Menchari’s impact best: “She taught us to look at the world through the prism of color,” he said. “She was a storyteller without equal.”
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