Moncef Nasri, 39, is men’s wear and made-to-measure manager at Loro Piana’s flagship London store. When he came to London in 1995 his ambition was to be a pilot, a writer or an interpreter but the sudden death of his father at the age of 51 changed his career path.
I was the only member of my family not born in France. I was born in Constantine, in north-east Algeria. It has been the site of so many civilisations. Once it was the capital of the ancient Berber kingdom of Numidia. It also had a Byzantine presence; it was conquered by the Arabs and much later became part of the Ottoman empire. Constantine is a city of bridges. It’s built on a rocky plateau at an altitude of more than 600 metres with a river, the Rhumel, cutting through the ravine that divides the city.
My father was a hotelier with a chain of brasseries throughout France. He was a writer as well. My mother was a professor of French language at Bordeaux University. She had a great impact on my life, helping me to understand the mechanism of other languages. I speak four languages fluently: French, Arabic, Italian and English, with Spanish on the way. I am trying to learn Russian. I tend to travel a lot and cater for clients predominantly from Russia and the Middle East. I speak Arabic but I need to improve my Russian.
When my father died in February 1997 I became the head of the family. I have three sisters and a brother and I am the oldest sibling. I had to deal with my father’s partners and sell his share of the business in France. That put a bit of a halt to my career. Nevertheless, I did a degree in customer service and management and then worked for a company training and advising retail managers and assistant managers. I realised I needed more. I was lucky enough to know a director of Ermenegildo Zegna, who took me on as a salesperson at the company’s New Bond Street shop. After a year I became manager of Zegna in 2001. [I was in this position] for a couple of years before being approached to join Brioni.
My job at Brioni was to create and develop a market for the house. Even though the company had been established in 1945 the British market was pretty new. Brioni had never had a proper flagship store in London up to this time. I dealt with clients such as Daniel Craig, Jack Nicholson, Christian Bale, Prince Charles occasionally, Eric Clapton, Kofi Annan, Luciano Pavarotti, Tom Hanks, Lakshmi Mittal. They were very, very down to earth. The Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was the business partner of Roman Abramovich at the time, was one of my biggest clients.
From the time I was five or six my father used to take me to Charvet [the Parisian bespoke shirtmaker] to have clothes made. Those distant memories have been engraved into my mind. I don’t believe there is one pre-eminent fashion centre. Fashion for me is divided in fragments. If you are talking colours then it’s Italy; if you are talking precision in bespoke it’s London; if you’re talking cosmetics it’s Paris. These three elements make fashion.
My wife, Katrina, is Swedish. She trained as a journalist and speaks seven languages. We met at the University of Westminster. Our combination has also made us very resilient because we are both from foreign countries. Our cosmopolitan background has obviously had an impact on our kids as well. My son, Zacharias, who is three, speaks three languages; my daughter, Miriam, who is nine, speaks Polish, French and English and she is starting to speak Italian. Knowing languages opens so many doors. It puts you at ease in a way. I want my kids to inherit that particular ability.
The way people look at life in Constantine is a little bit closer to our counterparts in Europe. As elsewhere in the Arab world, it is of really fundamental importance to eat with your family twice a day. The bonding in Constantine is much, much closer than in London. I leave home in London in the morning only to return at 7.30 in the evening – if I am lucky. This would never happen in Constantine. You would normally pay a visit home at least three or four times before the end of the working day.
I miss the Constantine climate even though London’s weather – often murky – has its own elegance, its own flavour. I miss Algerian cuisine. That is very, very important for me. I grew up eating kassra bread, not dissimilar to pitta but with its own special taste, with a tagine in the day, slightly drier in the morning so you can break it. You can’t find it anywhere else, it is unique. I miss [the Muslim festivals of] Eid, Ramadan – the flavour, the atmosphere, the breaking of the fast, that strict permutation of day and night.
But I love London. Ironically, when I go to Constantine I miss London. When I come back here I feel at home. London has sharpened my mind. It is uniquely cosmopolitan. In London you have all the cities of one world in one city. I love it. When I came to London 15 years ago shops closed for the better part of Saturdays and all Sunday. Now some stores are open for much of the weekend. I think that has spoiled the whole week in London. It has unbalanced the whole family structure. This is what I would change if I had a magic wand.
