Franco-Moroccan Author Leïla Slimani: From Eccentric Outsider to Literary Icon

"I was very impressed by their style: they had beautiful and clean Hervé Chapelier bags, often wore a nice bracelet, often a family one. I was different. I had brought some of my mother’s clothes from Morocco and I was buying vintage stuff. I loved to be seen, so I wore eccentric things," Leïla Slimani recalled in an interview with the magazine Elle on the occasion of the release of "I Will Carry the Fire", the last volume of her trilogy begun with "The Country of Others".

She was keen to point out that this strange style was accentuated by her physique. "At the time, it was not so common to see in Paris a girl with a Maghrebi physique, thick eyebrows, curly hair. It was seen as a provocation. I never straightened my hair. I identified with mixed-race beauties, with the ’Black Is Beautiful’ style." A rule she broke at the last Cannes Film Festival. She appeared unrecognizable when she walked up the steps for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, sporting a radically different hairstyle from her usual one: an ultra-smooth, slicked-back, subtly layered blow-dry that evoked the Hollywood icons of the 1930s.

The figure of Farida Khelfa was her source of inspiration at the time. "She was important to me. She soothed me in my relationship to beauty. She is an Arab, Maghrebi woman, with a strong physique. It contrasted with the clichés associated with the Oriental woman - lascivious, with generous forms. Farida has a dry, trendy physique. She opened up perspectives for me," Slimani admitted.