In My Shoes: A Memoir (7 page)

I looked at her and saw her face go white. “To save money,” Jimmy explained.

At that point my dad still hadn’t caught on. He said, “Oh. Okay. Great!”

Jimmy always wanted to share with Sandra, and when he didn’t get to, he would sit in the meetings at the factories and sulk and make rude, off-the-wall comments. His strange behavior was very obvious to the Italians and very embarrassing to the rest of us.

Each season, our first conference with each of the suppliers would be based on Sandra’s sketches. By the time of the second meeting we saw every shoe in the collection, with Sandra marking the shoe with a silver pen, moving the strap a millimeter down or up to get the balance right. I was obsessed. I really wanted to make the perfect shoe.

I would stand next to Francesco, our last maker, and say, “No, I want the toe flatter” or “Shave it down by a millimeter.” Then we’d go to the heel supplier and stand next to his machines. “No, thinner in the middle,” or “Wider,” or “More flared out at the base.” I had very clear ideas about what I wanted.

Month by month, the DNA of Jimmy Choo was expressing itself more and more clearly. In terms of manufacturing, this meant only the best components and an obsessive attention to detail. In terms of design, it meant vintage ideas reconsidered, exotic fabrics and extras, and sex appeal that was also sophisticated, never cheap.

So what makes a shoe sexy? It’s the balance of the foot, and where the straps are placed, and maybe being low cut at the front so you see toe cleavage. Then again, I’ve been told that the nerve endings for the genitals and the foot are adjacent in the brain, which is why a little cell
migration is capable of giving people all too great a passion for feet and for shoes. We tried to stop just short of that point.

When we started out, the shoe industry offered plenty of opportunities to innovate on a purely practical level. Boots for women had always been too wide at the calf, for instance, and nobody had thought about improving that aspect of the fit. So I created a line of boots with the upper portion cut very tight. Say your foot was a size 39 or 40 (8.5–9). For boots that size we would use the same upper portion you’d find on a traditionally sized 38 (7.5–8), which led to some comical moments in the store. For the longest time our only dedicated salesperson was Hannah Colman, my brother Daniel’s girlfriend. Hannah would have the customers lying on the sofa with their leg straight up in the air, struggling to pull the zipper down.

Vassi Chamberlain’s 1996 story in
Tatler
about the launch of Jimmy Choo had confirmed my sense that it was incumbent on me to have a certain look, a certain lifestyle, and plenty of exposure in the media. I never set out to “live” the brand. It just so happened that I had specific interests and friends, and I lived a certain way, all of which contributed to the buzz around Jimmy Choo. After a while, maintaining that lifestyle became part of the job, with all the added stresses and strains of running a company, along with encroachment on what otherwise might be considered “free” time. I was still living at home, I had no car, and I had absolutely no social life other than entertaining related to the business. And all the while, Sandra and I were each making the same £15,000 a year, which meant that I was always overdrawn at the bank.

At the beginning, we made Jimmy available to the press as well as
me, but at the events Brower Lewis set up, his only contribution was to complain that he was not designing the collection. This was entirely true, but not for want of our begging him to do so. Moreover, this was not a positive message we wanted conveyed to the public. But then even within the inner circle he remained a pall of negativity. When he came to monthly board meetings, he always brought his attorney, and then he’d have nothing to say. Adding insult to injury, he began to complain to his couture clients. “They stole my name. They’re ripping me off.” These were the phrases that got back to us. Somehow he failed to remember that we had licensed his name. In 2001, we bought it outright.

•  •  •  •

OVER TIME, JIMMY’S ECCENTRICITIES BECAME
even more personal, and more problematic.

A girlfriend of Sandra’s invited her to go to a Sting concert, and Sandra adored Sting. Jimmy called the friend and threatened her life. So that was that for the concert.

Then I was in the store one day, on the shop floor, when Jimmy came in. He went downstairs to see Sandra, and almost immediately she started screaming. I called my father and I said, “You better get here quick—something’s going on downstairs with Jimmy and he’s hurting Sandra.” Luckily, Dad was just around the corner at the Lowndes Hotel and it took him about two seconds to get there. My dad went racing down the stairs and told Jimmy to get out of the store. That would be the last time I’d see my business partner for many months.

Still another time, Sandra and Jimmy were supposed to be coming
to Motcomb Street for a meeting. They showed up late, and when Sandra walked in I could see she’d been crying. I took her aside and asked her what had happened. She said that Jimmy had hit her in the car on the way over. It seems Sandra had committed the unforgiveable offense of falling in love with Tony, the minicab driver her uncle had hired to spirit her away each evening. It was like something out of a fractured fairy tale. True to the trope, when the controlling uncle found out about this “betrayal,” as he saw it, he went absolutely mad.

A few days later my father and I took Sandra out to lunch at the restaurant across the street from the shop. We said, “Listen, something clearly is not right. If you need our help, we’ll help you.”

Shortly thereafter, Sandra showed up on my parents’ doorstep in an absolute state. She said she’d been sleeping in a car all weekend because Jimmy had chased her down the street with a knife.

“That’s it,” I said. “You’re not going home. You’re going to move in with me.”

So Sandra moved into my house on Chester Row, which gave her the opportunity to really open up and confide about the madness she’d been experiencing.

“Do you think I should see a psychiatrist?” she asked me.

I’d been through a spate of therapy myself, of course, and I’d found it quite helpful, so immediately I said yes. Obviously she was suffering from the consequences of a very twisted relationship with her uncle, and she needed a dispassionate observer to help her sort it out. Jimmy had helped her when she first came to London, but he’d been manipulating her sense of obligation ever since, as well as any guilt she may
have felt for no longer being at his beck and call. So she got some professional help, and she lived with me for about a year, and after a while she seemed fine.

Jimmy stayed in his shop during that year, and his only contact with Sandra was through forwarding her mail. When it arrived I could see Chinese characters scrawled across the envelopes in pencil. I asked her, “What does this mean?”

“Traitor,” she said.

Jimmy was upset not just because she’d told others what was going on, or because she’d moved out and was living with me, but obviously because she was taking time away from his shop to work for this new company. Sandra had been in his studio for years, essentially as his slave. I think he’d assumed he could get her to do all the work for the Jimmy Choo brand and that people would still see the design as having come from him.

Sandra had gone through a lot of stress, and we felt we needed to reward her for the good work she was doing. My father was chairman, and my title was managing director, so in December 1997 we gave her the title of creative director. This was another mistake born of my naïveté because I didn’t really think about titles that much. But this one proved misleading to the industry, often creating confusion about my role and Sandra’s.

A creative director does not necessarily make sketches, but instead formulates and impresses upon the designers the vision that informs the collection as a whole. The creative director establishes the kinds of designs that will be created, incorporating a sense of what will appeal
to a target market. It’s steering, not rowing. So even though my loftier title was managing director, I remained de facto creative director as well.

•  •  •  •

IMMEDIATELY AFTER OUR FIRST BIG
sale to Saks, my father had told me, “If you want to be a serious business, you have to break into America.” This was probably the best advice he ever gave me, because without a strong North American presence, it seems to take British brands about twenty years to truly “arrive.”

We had cracked Saks and Giorgio Beverly Hills, but now we wanted our own dedicated stores as well. So my dad called on his old friends from his Vidal Sassoon venture, Philip Rogers and Annie Humphries. Back in the eighties, Richardson-Vicks had sold the Vidal Sassoon product line to Procter and Gamble, and Rogers and Humphries, a stylist and a colorist, respectively, had acquired the shops.

My father took Philip to lunch at the Carlton Tower and proposed a deal that would allow us to expand exponentially, but on a shoestring budget. He offered Philip and Annie a 50 percent stake in a new subsidiary called Jimmy Choo USA. Their end of the bargain was to provide a fully functional, ready-made back office to handle our North American retail operation, that back office being Vidal Sassoon’s staff and systems. In addition, we would be able to follow in the Vidal Sassoon slipstream in terms of real estate, where we could benefit from Vidal’s established reputation as a guarantor for the leases. Philip and Annie agreed.

After thirty years on Rodeo Drive, Vidal had acquired two adjoining spaces on the corner of North Canon and Little Santa Monica
Boulevard. We took the one on the corner because it had a big window with columns that you saw if you were driving up Santa Monica, so it was like having a billboard on this major thoroughfare. It also didn’t hurt, when selling high-end women’s shoes, to be next door to a high-end hair salon. I would have preferred to have been back at the center of the target, Rodeo Drive itself, but certainly I couldn’t complain about the rent—our share would be slightly less than half the $15,000 a month.

Philip’s choice to design the interior for the new store was an architect who’d worked with him at Sassoon. Philip and my dad wanted to use him to save money, but designing a hair salon is different from designing a retail space—much more functional—and I never felt that he was able to translate my vision. Trouble is, once the store was done, we were stuck with it for quite a while.

Aesthetic quibbles aside, we still needed to launch with a bang, and to do that we hired a wonderful woman from the wilds of Canada named Marilyn Heston. She had worked for BWR Public Relations but had recently set up her own shop, called GGI, for Get Good Ink. I liked Marilyn a lot, and, having just launched a new venture, she was really hungry. Rather than our going to a big firm and being handed off to some account manager, I knew Marilyn would be able to give us the attention that we wanted.

Marilyn had started out managing VIPs on cruise ships, where she happened to meet the actor Charlton Heston and his family. One thing led to another, and she wound up marrying Charlton’s son, Fraser, by which time she was doing publicity for films like
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The first time she went to the Oscars, it was as Fraser Heston’s
date, and she wore a simple skirt and blouse—a fashion faux pas that imprinted deeply in her psyche and that led indirectly to her becoming the essential go-between for the world of fashion and the world of the Hollywood star.

Marilyn set up a joint Vidal Sassoon/Jimmy Choo launch event, with the proceeds from sales going to help the Children’s Action Network. Stars like Rosanna Arquette and Rita Wilson came by to pick out shoes (while being photographed by us). My brother Daniel served as DJ and we got food from Maple Drive, the restaurant owned by Dudley Moore. Dad invited a lot of his friends from the beauty business and from the corporate side of Hollywood, and suddenly we “belonged.”

Our entry into L.A. could not have been better timed because the cultural context of fashion was going through a sea change. Magazines had always put beautiful models on their covers, but over time they realized that featuring an actress instead sent their newsstand sales through the roof. We were entering the age of All Celebrities, All the Time.

If celebrity worship was the new world religion, then the holiest night of the year took place in the spring when all the glitterati gathered for the Academy Awards. A magazine feature could reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers for a fashion brand. The way to reach a billion was to dress the actresses who were competing with each other for attention at that one highly televised event. Designers had learned that getting their gown on the right body on the red carpet was a force second to none. We wanted to achieve the same éclat for shoes.

Women in Hollywood are hardly rubes when it comes to fashion. They have stylists to make sure they know what’s good and what’s
happening even when they’re simply buying for their personal wardrobe. Anyone who’d ever shopped in London knew about Jimmy Choo, so it was not all that difficult to find lovely young feet happy to be associated with our brand. Of course, even more aware of the cutting edge were the stylists to the stars, and because these people worked for multiple clients, contact with a single stylist gave us that many more shots at scoring a win.

In the spring of 1998, we made our first foray into the Oscars, and I was up all night on the phone from London trying to orchestrate the gifting of shoes to all the right women. Our payoff came through Kate Winslet, nominated for Best Actress for
Titanic
, when she mentioned her Jimmy Choos—a first for any shoe brand—on the red carpet. Going forward, Oscar night was to become a major event on the Jimmy Choo calendar.

I called around London after the show, describing this wonderful thing we’d just done, a breakthrough I thought all the features writers should write about, only to discover that no one in England watched the Oscars. Hilary Alexander at the
Telegraph
was the only one who took the bait, and she did a big piece with pictures of the actresses and pictures of the shoes. After that, interest in the Oscars exploded in the UK.