Read Online In My Shoes: A Memoir by Tamara Mellon, William Patrick - Free Book Online Page B

we absolutely couldn’t use them, so here we were at the Plaza Hotel with a stand for displaying product and, once again, no product to display. We felt like fools. We were so ashamed, in fact, that on the way out we actually walked down a half dozen flights of stairs to avoid the elevators for fear of running into anyone who might ask to see what we had to offer.
    I tried to carry on, selling from sketches, but no one was interested. Well, almost no one. The lone ray of hope during this otherwise dismal expedition came from Michael Stachowski, who placed a modest order for Giorgio Beverly Hills. This was the legendary boutique that had launched Rodeo Drive in the early sixties, when movie stars like Natalie Wood and Liz Taylor used to come with an extra limo in tow for their packages. So if we had only one outlet, this was not a bad one to have.
    The next shoe show was in Düsseldorf later that fall. We had nochoice but to go with the same designs, but I asked Jimmy to remake all the samples by hand. “I’m only doing this for you,” he said, and I was thinking, “What’s your problem? You own half the company, you know.” But he still acted as if doing anything on behalf of the brand was a major imposition on his time.
    In Düsseldorf we at least had well-made shoes to display, but nothing sold, and now I had to face the fact that even with quality samples, the concepts Jimmy and Sandra had come up with were just not that exciting. This is when it dawned on me that Jimmy was a cobbler, and he really had no interest in becoming a designer. I had set up a business with a “creative head” who, in fact, had no creativity.
    This was the point at which I moved Sandra to Motcomb Street. For the next collection, I would come up with the ideas and Sandra would sketch them out on paper.
    Over the winter, Sandra and I started going to the weekend flea market on Portobello Road where I’d had my T-shirt stand with Barnzley, only now the objective was to pick out pieces that could inspire designs. But we were not alone. One day we were browsing, only to realize that we had Dolce on one side of us and Gabbana on the other, and we were all staring at the same shoe.
    I would buy vintage things and put them into different groups that made up little stories. Sometimes I would find a focus on a single vintage shoe. At other times I would say, “Let’s put the front of that sandal together with the back of that shoe.” I was also collecting pieces of jewelry and bits of fabric. Later, we would go to the manufacturing trade show in Italy called Lineapelle, which was a huge eye-opener for me, with pavilion upon pavilion devoted to buckles, feathers, leatherflowers, bits of fur, resin, studs, glass beads, lasts and heels, and, of course, the glitter fabric that became a Jimmy Choo staple. I had never known there were so many possibilities.
    But that’s how the Jimmy Choo DNA began to emerge. The first collections were based on things that had caught my eye. The lovely part of it was that the things that struck me, and that I related to emotionally, other women related to as well.
    During this period Jimmy would drop by the shop nearly every day, but only to drink tea and to check in on his niece. It was obvious that having Sandra beyond his immediate control was very upsetting for him. Never one to give in easily, he insisted that she be picked up every day precisely at six p.m. in a minicab driven by a friend of his so that she could then work “the night shift” back in Hackney, helping her uncle fill orders for his couture clientele.
    The few times that Jimmy had anything to say about design, it was with a complaint that I was making the heels too high or in some other way violating the cordwainers’ code. But what he saw as heresy, the rest of us saw as innovation, style, and fun.
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    AT THIS VERY EARLY STAGE, a friend introduced me to two young publicists named Natalie Lewis and Tracey Brower, who had