Three years after the prostitution scandal began, Zahia Dehar appeared at the end of her own elaborate couture show in Paris in January. (AP)
Dehar (above, with Christian Louboutin) is already cozy with the haute fashion world. (WireImage)
STROLLING into the chic Paul Bocuse brasserie in Lyon for a recent business lunch, former call girl-turned-lingerie designer Zahia Dehar swivels heads and drops jaws as she is whisked into the VIP section with her entourage of publicists, makeup people and stylists.
The 21-year-old Barbie look-alike with big hair and perfectly tanned nubile curves — immortalized in the European press with the nickname “La Scandaleuse” — soon becomes the topic of chatter as the diners discuss her meteoric rise to fame.
That celebrity will soon cross the Atlantic with the stateside launch of her sumptuous undergarments line. New York fashionistas are eagerly awaiting the fall arrival of the ultra-sexy, uber-expensive designs.
“Everything in fashion starts in France, and the rest of the world follows,” says Manhattan-based lingerie expert Jené Luciani. “Zahia’s range is pretty, feminine and, most of all, unique.”
Dehar’s headline-grabbing missteps clearly add to the appeal. “America loves the infamous as much as the famous, and we will find her fascinating for sure,” adds Luciani.
She may be reinventing herself as the creator of haute couture, but Dehar remains at the center of a salacious court case involving two French national soccer players who supposedly paid for her favors when she worked as a teenage prostitute.
Her former career — she once referred to herself as a “birthday gift” to Bayern Munich soccer star Franck Ribéry and revealed she charged her clients $2,600 for each night of passion — has hardly been an obstacle to her new,
multimillion-dollar success.
Fashion maestro Karl Lagerfeld hailed the Algerian-born Lolita as the new Coco Chanel, comparing her to the 18th-
century courtesans who “entertained” the French monarchy. “Zahia incarnates the very French tradition of gallantry,” he gushed.
Meanwhile, Christian Louboutin, Jean Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix have backed her label, which she has famously showcased on her own enviable, wasp-shaped figure on the Paris runways.
She has been described as being “her own muse” and constructs her designs on a molded cast she commissioned of her 92-pound body.
“Zahia is really the most fascinating person and incredibly talented,” says vintage clothing king Cameron Silver, who will roll out Dehar’s new couture and ready-to-wear lines at his fabled Decades store in LA later this year.
Speaking to the New York Post ahead of Couture Week in France, where he has been meeting Dehar and her associates, Silver adds: “I simply can’t judge her for anything she did in the past.
“She took what could have been a very devastating experience for anyone and turned herself into a highly successful businesswoman with a very serious collection of couture.”
And what a collection it is. With a flamboyant, so-called “gateau bonbon” theme — candies and cakes, especially macarons, are reported passions of Dehar — it includes bras and thongs decorated with cute organza bows and intricate barely-there lace negligees.
Each piece is handmade by a team of French seamstresses.
The giddy fashion media has called Dehar’s inspiration “Marie Antoinette meets Vegas showgirl.” The average price for a set of her lingerie is a mere $1,000.
Dehar’s path to notoriety began in 2010, when she was exposed as the underage hooker whom Ribéry and his pal, Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema, had allegedly hired. She was 16 and 17 when the alleged encounters took place.
In France, where the age of consent is 15 and prostitution is legal for women age 18 and above, paying for sex with minors is a crime. The trial of the two sportsmen opened in Paris last month amid much brouhaha, but was adjourned until January 2014 because of legal technicalities.
In a recent interview with Liberation Next magazine, Dehar, who immigrated to France from Algeria at the age of 10, said she was horrified by her (then) unwanted infamy. It was a particular shock for her Islamic mother, who lived in a run-down neighborhood of Paris.
“I was devastated,” recalls Dehar, who maintains she would never reveal her true age to her clients. “The whole world knew about me for doing that. It really hurt. I cried for six months; I thought I’d never go out again.”
But go out she did. Her baby-face looks and Brigitte Bardot physique immediately enraptured the fashion glitterati. A stylist came onboard, and Dehar posed for a series of artsy pictures by a swimming pool for the Italian edition of Vanity Fair.
Next came a tearful interview with the glossy French weekly Paris Match, in which she briefly talked about her life as a call girl around the clubs and hotels of the ritzy Champs-Élysées district in the French capital.
Asked about the married Ribéry, who allegedly flew her to Germany as a 26th birthday gift to himself, she coyly asked the reporter: “Don’t you think I make a pretty present?”
In the same interview, she added: “I’m not a prostitute. I’m not part of any network. I don’t have a pimp and I don’t give my money to anyone.
“I do whatever I like. I have sex — paid or unpaid — with whoever I want. Nobody forces me.”
These days, however, Dehar prefers not to talk about her past, claiming she has put the brief episode behind her.
When a British journalist dared to ask recently about her experiences as a call girl and whether any of her former clients came to watch her fashion shows, she dissolved into tears. “That,” scolded her publicist, “was totally, absolutely the wrong question to ask!”
Instead, she is happy to discuss the inspiration for her lingerie — she was apparently influenced by Marie Antoinette’s famous petting farm, where she would play at being a peasant girl — and her new pop-up patisserie-cum-lingerie store in a top Paris department store.
Intriguingly, shoppers can munch on macaroons and meringues while they try on her pricey undies line.
Perhaps inevitably, Dehar is pursuing her ambition to become a reality TV star in both Europe and America.
Then there’s also that time-honored pageant-queen pledge of wanting to help others less fortunate than herself — namely animals and orphans.
“I want to open institutions for their recovery,” she told Paris Match in an article last week about her latest lingerie range. “I want to give dogs and infants the chance to realize their dreams.”
jridley@nypost.com