In My Shoes: A Memoir (11 page)

“In the back with your mother,” he said, scarcely looking up. I walked down the hallway to the bedroom, which was fairly dark, and I remember having this utterly creepy feeling that almost made me sick. It was the feeling of fear I’d always associated with my mother, as if she were entirely capable of causing me serious harm. Now I was feeling that sense of menace on behalf of my daughter.

•  •  •  •

THE DEMANDS OF THE BUSINESS
didn’t grow any less just because I’d taken on new responsibilities in my personal life, and as I charged through my days I began to feel more and more like a prizefighter. I was lucky to get a few seconds to sit in my corner, but after a splash from the water bucket and some styptic for the cuts, the bell would ring and it was on to the next round. I always seemed to be counterpunching, responding to whatever craziness was being thrown at me. I was desperate to get out ahead, struggling to break into the open air.

In the UK, most department stores lease the space for their shoe departments and let a third party manage it, but Harvey Nichols was different. They ran their own shoe department, but it never had been a great success. Manolo Blahnik still refused to sell through any of the London retailers, so the US brand Joan & David predominated, but then in 2000 they filed for bankruptcy. This left Harvey Nichols with space to fill, and so they gave us 700 square feet in the front of the shoe department to create a Jimmy Choo in-store boutique.

The night before we launched our concession, in September 2002, I held a dinner at San Lorenzo. I had a poem printed on T-shirts to give away to guests:

I think I’m in love with my shoe

I was sure that it felt the same, too

’til it happened to mention

With heartless intention

“I’m dating a gold Jimmy Choo.”

I had wanted to make these boutiques such a nonintimidating environment that a woman would feel so comfortable coming in that she’d simply want to stay. I thought these spaces should be very feminine, like a 1940s boudoir designed by Jean-Michel Frank or Jean Royère. In 2002 that meant using David Collins, a luxury interior designer and architect who could masterfully create this look. But once again Robert had his own ideas. David came in for a meeting, but Robert argued that he wouldn’t be able to manage the rollout and insisted that we use a company called Vudafieri, who had designed for Pucci.

I met with Vudafieri and laid out my vision, and then we went back and forth looking at sketches. Usually you’ll get a warehouse somewhere and you’ll do a mock-up, but we were so rushed for time that my first glimpse was actually at the store, and only a few hours before opening. I was mortified. It was so tacky—more like a bordello than a boudoir, and a Barbie bordello at that. The sofas were badly designed, there were little mirrored stools with lilac crystal balls, and the chandeliers had horrible multi-crystal beads. And there was no hiding this monstrosity because you went up the escalator and—bam!—there it was. The humiliation was all the more because it was personal. I was the one in charge of the brand’s image, so naturally everyone was going to assume I’d done this. But this was another instance of Robert’s need to exercise control and power, even when he lacked the appropriate experience and sensibility. For him, it was all about winning the point—my person, not yours—rather than acting in the best interest of the company. It was a huge mistake that I didn’t push harder for what I knew to be right. But every time I’d complain about something, I’d be told, “You’re not a team player.” I came to realize that this is what a man says to a woman in business any time she isn’t willing to do what he wants.

We didn’t have the time or the money to hire another designer, so we were stuck with Vudafieri’s fiasco, not only for Harvey Nichols, but for all of our other boutiques. The best we could do was to tone it down, and at least by the time we moved into our new location in Manhattan I could stand to look at it without wanting to retch.

Between 2001 and 2002 our business at Saks had exploded from $200,000 to $2 million. We had to raise our prices to hedge against the
decline of the dollar, but the growth was real. We had amazing product, and our sell-through rate was so good that Saks increased the number of stores they put us in to thirty-nine. They were committing to us the way Neiman Marcus had invested in Manolo.

The in-store boutiques and the department stores were great for volume, but in terms of profit, our own stores would always deliver more. This was the financial reality that had prompted the talk of expansion that led to Jimmy’s departure and to our being saddled with Phoenix and Robert in the first place. As far as I was concerned, there was no turning back now.

The greatest opportunity for expansion was the seemingly limitless commercial real estate lined up along the seemingly endless corridors of America’s shopping malls. The first of these that we penetrated was South Coast Plaza in Orange County, California. It was perfectly located at the confluence of major freeways and a short drive from the wealth of Newport Beach. I was on hand when we opened next door to Armani in 2002. I then went on to Florida to open a store in Coral Gables, south of Miami, and both of these locations did brilliantly.

I did not, however, attend our opening at the Mall at Millenia in Orlando. This store was entirely Robert’s idea, and I knew it wasn’t going to work. Even Matthew said to me, “Nobody in Orlando is going to buy your shoes,” and his instincts were right. The store was a dud.

The rivalry between Robert and me became even more toxic as it extended beyond issues of expenditures or real estate and began to eat away at the creativity of our brand.

I’d been collaborating on a series of ads with Raymond Meier, one of the great accessories photographers. He works mostly for American
Vogue
, and there’s not a big location fee because he usually shoots at his studio in New York. But I began to experience a surprising headwind of resistance from within the company, which I would later discover to be deliberately inspired by Robert.

The immediate upshot was that I turned to my second choice, Helmut Newton, to do a shoot along a seedy dockside in Monaco. It showed a serene-looking woman in black stockings and stilettos leaning against a chain-link fence. Of course you could see up her skirt.

The trouble was that, while Helmut had done brilliant work in the seventies, and what he produced for us was technically brilliant, we still needed an art director. I was forced into that role, but this was not long after I’d given birth to Minty. I still had all this belly fat, and I felt ugly and stupid and exhausted, and it was hard to influence him. This was the fashion business after all. Given the way I looked, what could I know? So what we came out with was static and flat, when what we needed was a compelling narrative to tell our story.

Most fundamentally, our problem was that for anything creative we were caught in the squeeze of needing A-list box office on a B-list movie budget, and the pressure fell on me to create wonders on a shoestring. Fortunately, when you’re forced to work outside the box, sometimes you stumble upon something that’s absolutely brilliant.

Brett Ratner was an old friend, and one day I was at his house in California looking at an album of his photographs. He’d directed the film
Rush Hour
, among others, and
I thought his still work was fantastic. I said, “Why don’t you do a campaign for us?”

Brett had “narrative” coming out his ears, and he came up with a concept and storyboards for a series of ads that looked like stills from
a Quentin Tarantino movie. The first one had Nicole Richie and Shawn Hatosy in a glamorous night scene, fighting their way through paparazzi, and of course her Jimmy Choo bag was front and center. Then we put Heather Marks out on a landing strip at night, holding a flare to signal the plane. Smuggling? Espionage? Who knows? In another, a gorgeous model and Quincy Jones are driving across the desert to dispose of a body. In one shot they’ve dug a hole and are leaning on the shovel, another model’s feet (in Jimmy Choos, of course) sticking up from the open trunk of the car. In another, Quincy sits in the backseat of the old Lincoln, glowering, while the beautiful blonde in her Jimmy Choos and a killer dress changes the tire. Another takes the cinematic reference all the way back to
Sunset Boulevard
, with the gorgeous model in the gold lamé swimsuit standing outside a modernist house in the Hollywood Hills. In the swimming pool beside her floats the body of a man in a
Reservoir Dogs
black suit and skinny tie.

The campaign only lasted three seasons because it became more and more difficult as we went along, and then it began to deteriorate. We’d started out with something that was too expensive and we didn’t have a proper art director. We wanted it to run in all the high-end glossies, which was incredibly expensive, so, given our skeletal budget, we had to run it very cleverly—one month in
Vogue
, the next month in
Harper’s Bazaar
, and so on. I had so much on my plate that eventually I just threw up my hands in despair and let Sandra give it a try. But that didn’t work out any better.

Our next strategy for dramatic growth was in handbags. The Fendi Baguette had become a “must have” in the late nineties. Prada introduced their Bowling Bag, and then came the Chloé Paddington and
the Yves Saint Laurent Mombasa. We’d sold about six hundred Jimmy Choo bags in 2001, mostly evening bags that went with the shoes, but now we wanted to move more aggressively. Being known as an “accessories brand” was far superior to being known as just a shoe company, and bags were the natural next step.

We needed a strong design link to the shoe, but we didn’t want to limit ourselves to evening bags, so we brought in the Spanish designer Alvaro Gonzales. He had a studio in Florence, and his usual role was as a consultant, but we hired him to do the actual design. Later, we put him on staff in charge of bags.

We held design meetings to look at the prototypes as they began to arrive from Italy. The idea was that you’d have your main bag—the signature piece—and then you’d do variations—smaller, larger, with different options. The favorite was the Tulita. The leather was soft and sensual, but it carried external pockets and buckles that gave it an edge.

In March 2003, I hosted a lunch at the Plaza Athénée in New York for a small circle of well-connected women, including Cornelia Guest and Lillian von Stauffenberg. Caroline Berthet had replaced Harrison and Shriftman in handling our events and publicity, and after dessert we gave each of these women “the bag.” It wouldn’t be available in stores for another five months, but I wanted it to be seen and coveted, which it was. We developed long waiting lists for it in a range of styles, from a small evening bag to a large tote. In the seasons that followed, we always gifted the fashion editors just before each major show, hoping to ignite the same kind of buzz.

That summer, our next big innovation was “The Flash,” an item dropped into the collection at midseason to draw customers into the
store and to keep the press buzzing. The first of these was a $330 foam, high-heel wedge with a “flip-flop” top, made of terry cloth. It was the perfect shoe for getting a pedicure, and it sold like mad.

In 2003, we also opened four new stores in the United States: Dallas in March; Manhasset, Long Island, in May; Short Hills, New Jersey, in September; and 716 Madison Avenue in Manhattan in August. These were in the range of 1,000 to 1,500 square feet, and rents were cheaper than they’d been before 9/11 turned the economy on its head. We opened in Moscow the same year.

•  •  •  •

MATTHEW WAS TRYING HARD AND
doing better, and Jennifer Moores, daughter of the San Diego Padres owner, invested $2.2 million in Harry’s of London, so things were looking up. Still, he bristled at being referred to as “the husband of . . .” Mostly, his biochemical demons were still very much an issue.

That summer he and I got the notion that we should go to Deepak Chopra’s institute in San Diego so that Matthew could get some help, as he put it, “with the critters in my head” We flew all the way there, only to discover that the institute was closed. (The assistant who’d booked the flights hadn’t checked.) We pleaded and cajoled, and eventually we got Deepak to come and spend a few hours with us, but to no great effect.

This was the same summer that Matthew and I went to Ibiza, where we rented the house of French fashion designer Jacqueline de Ribes. Ibiza has its lovely, quiet side where you can swim in your own little cove. Then again, it’s also known for its huge party scene at places like Pacha and Amnesia, so it was a bit of a risk.

Our neighbors were Elle Macpherson, and Simon and Yasmin Le Bon, as well as a large contingent of friends from Narc Anonymous, who I hoped would help keep Matthew on the straight and narrow. Max and Jane Gottschalk joined us on the island, as did Arabella Bodie, former girlfriend of Prince Andrew, now married to Glenn Spiro, the jewelry designer. We threw a big dinner for Valentino and other guests that included Jade Jagger, as well as a fair-haired boy named Oscar Humphries, the son of Barry Humphries, the comedian who plays the role of Dame Edna. Unfortunately somebody wanted to go out clubbing, and inevitably Matthew volunteered to take him.

I should have known better. I should have tied him to a chair. The best I could do was to ask Glenn to “keep an eye” on him. Matthew insisted on trying out a club called Space, and all seemed to go swimmingly. Everyone had a nice time, Matthew drove them home, and then it was off to bed. But not for my husband. No one realized it at the time, but he turned around, went back to the club, and launched into his preferred state of suborbital mania.

When I woke up the next morning he still wasn’t home. In fact, he didn’t come home for another three days. When at last he came staggering up the drive with a bottle of vodka in his hands, that was it for me. I had my own daughter and two of our friends’ children present and this was simply not acceptable.

I let him sleep it off, but then the next day I told him, “You simply have to leave.”