Come Away with Me
BRIMMING WITH BOUNDLESS IMAGINATION, HERMÈS WINDOW DISPLAYS WERE AN EARLY SOURCE OF STYLING INSPIRATION TO JACQUIE ANG. SHE SALUTES THE LATE LEÏLA MENCHARI, THE MAVERICK BEHIND THE DREAMY SHOWCASES
Friend and eminent French novelist Michel Tournier dubbed Leïla Menchari “The Queen of Enchantment”. The nickname was no exaggeration: the window dresser made magic out of the displays at the 0ermvs flagship store at 24 Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which mesmerised passers-by as they took in her fantastical creations.
Menchari was so beloved that, even though she retired in 2013, the august maison staged the exhibition Hermès à tire-d’aile – Les mondes de Leïla Menchari (Hermès at a glance – the worlds of Leïla Menchari) at the Grand Palais in Paris in 201 . 1t featured eight magnificent sets by scenographer Nathalie Crinière, inspired by Menchari’s spectacular windows, each one a paean to Hermès’ distinguished craftsmanship and values.
Accompanying the showcase was the book Leïla Menchari, the
Queen of Enchantment, which chronicled her career through 137 of her displays. The twin celebration of her poetic, often playful vision permitted a wider audience to discover and experience her lavish visual feasts.
“The key is to be able to evoke things that people have liked by expressing them differently,º 5enchari said.
“That’s also what we’re doing with this exhibition at the Grand Palais" We’re bringing obRects out again but for different images. We’re reshu ټ ing the cards. The result is a stroll through tableaux that are completely different from the original window displays. 1t’s a new journey.”
Cinema was the starting point of Menchari’s career. Born in 1927 in Tunis, she was encouraged to watch movies by her mother, who was an early champion of women’s emancipation. She regaled her cousins, who were unable to enRoy such freedom, about the films she’d watched, enriched with many details. “It could keep us up all night,” she recalled. “I’ve always loved storytelling. And here [in Hermès], that’s all I do.”
The brown-haired, green-eyed girl trained as a painter at the
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then worked for fashion designer Guy Laroche as his preferred model. But her parents insisted that she find a “properº profession.
In 1961, she showed her drawings to Annie Beaumel. The director of window displays and pioneer of Hermès’ extraordinary staging enthused: “You’re a dreamer, aren’t you?” Menchari was hired with the instruction: “Draw me your dreams!”
She began to see window displays as a way of telling a story. “The big window is a theatre for which 1 had to find a tableau to fit a story. I’d done theatre sets at the Beaux-Arts and loved it. But this particular theatre set is far more difficult" there’s no text, no movement and no distance. You have to cover everything: you’re a designer, painter, composer, theatre director ... ”
;he scoured flea markets until it became an obsession. “1 was constantly watching, jotting things down, sketching. I was like a sponge. 1 also travelled a lot.º A globetrotter, she explored different cultures, and was fascinated by traditional Japanese handicrafts as well as Indian savoir faire. But she often found herself back in her native Tunisia, where her garden inspired French perfumer JeanClaude Ellena’s fragrance, Un Jardin en Méditerranée, for Hermès in 2003. 1t was Rust one Tunisian influence · from warm colours to precious materials – that she brought to the maison.
By the time she joined Beaumel’s team as an assistant, the windows had earned an international reputation. “Thanks to Annie Beaumel and Leïla Menchari, creating window displays has become a form of artistic expression and it’s now recognised as such,” marvelled artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas.
Menchari took over the creative reins in 1978, and raised the bar during the next 35 years with the myriad unexpected materials and inventive collaborators that she’d summon to realise her incredible dreams. “0er enchanting tales caught me by surprise" a field of wheat from which, to our astonishment, a mouse scurried out; a multicoloured winged saddle suspended in mid-air; a glistening palace of an absent maharani ... Each fantastical landscape was more extraordinary than the one before,” reminisced CEO Axel Dumas.
Menchari remembered the time she looked for reindeer antlers. “Giraudon, a chemical engineer I used to work with, sent me to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. I found myself in the basement looking at a mountain of tangled-up reindeer antlers recovered from animals that had fought each other to death ... It was extraordinary.”
The sets she conjured were extravaganzas, but the most complex to create were the simplest.
“For the Year of the Stars and Mythology, for example, I asked the sculptor Albert Féraud, a friend from the Beaux-Arts who used to work mainly with metal, to make me a meteorite that would rotate in space, in the big window. It was completely crazy...
“He used a block of metal he had left over from making the Koenig Memorial at Porte Maillot in Paris. I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to create a thing that rotated in mid-air and it was impossible to see how it was done…”
The workshops never refused her. “Artisans would fight for the chance to make Leïla’s window displays!” Axel said. “And yet, it was complicated: It would take 50 hours to make a bag instead of 15, they’d be behind schedule, stressed…”
“We were all stressed,” Menchari interjected. “When you create a window display, you reduce four variations without repetition and with very little time; but you also work frantically for months on details, fabrics, embroidery ... I’ve tried to amaze myself. It had to be unexpected, unusual and surprising, and it had to engage passers-by.”
Despite her many elaborate executions, she pulled off minimalist mise-en-scènes too. “I once did a very simple one with almost nothing in it: a beach, a reef sculpted from white marble that resembled a wave, and a pair of sunglasses and a swimsuit. And I had Eau d’Orange Verte sprayed on to the street. Jean-Louis Dumas’ initial reaction was to say, ‘But Leïla, there’s nothing there,’ and then he saw a lady inhale the scent and he said to her, ‘Breathe, Madame, breathe,’ and with that, he attracted more people, passed on my story and there was soon a crowd.”
That was her secret to success. “When designing a scene, there must always be some mystery, because mystery is a springboard to dreams. 5ystery is an invitation to fill in the gaps left by the imagination.º
The maison’s trust in Menchari was so deep that no one ever checked the window displays before the blinds went up. But that confidence stretched much further than her title, director of window displays, to which she was promoted in 1978. It gave her a seat on the
Hermès colours committee, where her formidable creative energy even influenced the palettes used for the next season’s silk scarves.
“Many of us at Hermès have learnt a lot from Leïla,” wrote Pierre-Alexis Dumas after the house heard that she’d succumbed to Covid-19 on April 4, at the age of 93. “She taught us to look at the world through the prism of colour. She was a storyteller without equal who enchanted the world. We’re infinitely grateful to her for all that she’s done for us, that she passed on to us.
“Open, generous and resolutely modern, she was a woman of freedom. Her passing leaves to all those who had the joy of knowing and working with her, on both sides of the Mediterranean, the memory of a perpetual quest for beauty, a boundless passion for creation and craftsmanship.”
The next time you come across Hermès windows, or see its scarves, take time to enRoy the escapism of 5enchari’s legacy. 1t’s a flight of surreal fantasy in the midst of our often prosaic reality.
“WHEN DESIGNING A SCENE, THERE MUST ALWAYS BE SOME MYSTERY. IT IS A SPRINGBOARD TO DREAMS. MYSTERY IS AN INVITATION TO FILL IN THE GAPS LEFT BY THE IMAGINATION”