The waiter is back, this time with a glass-domed plate piled high with little Sicilian desserts. ‘Oh!’ moans Dolce. ‘I love cakes.’
‘Sugar is like a drug. If I have one bite, I need to eat it all,’ says Gabbana. ‘I can eat an entire panettone in one sitting.’
And, yet, neither touches the pastries. When we finish coffee and the designers mount the wide, curving staircase to their atelier and I am escorted out into the Milanese sunshine, I remember those sweets, sitting under the glass dome, and consider the fact that, no matter how much face-making and sighing Dolce and Gabbana did to indicate their desires, no matter how tempted they claimed to be, they stayed in absolute control. After all, you don’t eat the props, do you?
DOLCE & GABBANA HQ
7 Via San Damiano, Milan 20122
* * *
carrot and bulgar soup steamed turbot, sautéed fennel, broccoli rabe and seaweed
Sicilian pastries and mixed berries bottled water espresso
* * *
Total gratis
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4 DECEMBER 2010
Tamara Mellon
Head over heels
At the Four Seasons in New York, the founder of Jimmy Choo talks about posing naked, understanding private equity and her plans for a lifestyle brand
By Vanessa Friedman
At the beginning of my lunch with Tamara Mellon, the 43-year-old founder and present chief creative officer of Jimmy Choo, the maître d’ put us in the wrong room at the Four Seasons. Or, to be fair, he put me in the wrong room. There are two: the Grill Room, which is small and woody and near the bar, and the Pool Room, which is a much grander space in the back, set around a large burbling fountain. Fashion people tend to like the Grill Room; bankers and captains of industry tend to like the Pool Room. Mellon’s uncle-in-law, Jay Mellon, for example, the Mellon family patriarch, likes the Pool Room, and that’s where he takes her when they have lunch. Which may be why the maître d’ assumed she wanted to sit there when we met.
But as anyone who reads both the tabloid and the broadsheet press knows, when it comes to Tamara Mellon, you should never assume anything. So five minutes after I start drinking my Pellegrino in the Pool Room, a rather flustered waiter appears and apologetically takes me back to the Grill Room.
Where I find Mellon, on a banquette, snuggled up under the arm of financier Nat Rothschild, giggling. She is wearing a leopard-print silk sheath dress and towering black Jimmy Choo booties, which look familiar from a YouTube video I had seen of the walk-in closet in her gigantic Fifth Avenue apartment (which she bought from Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr, as detailed by blogger the Real Estalker, for $20m), including her hundreds of pairs of Choos.
In other words, she looks just like the sort of trophy wife you might expect to see sitting with an international mover and shaker in a quintessential uptown New York restaurant – except she is neither a wife (she was very publicly divorced from Matthew Mellon in 2003, complete with acrimonious court case and allegations of computer hacking, but they are now friends), nor anyone’s trophy. On the contrary, these days she is busy collecting trophies of her own.
Earlier this autumn, for example, Mellon was in London receiving her OBE from the Queen for services to British fashion. Jimmy Choo has 115 stores in 32 countries, and has been valued at close to £500m. Then, the week before we meet, she was named as one of David Cameron’s new global trade envoys, along with fellow accessory supremo Anya Hindmarch and Sir Anthony Bamford of JCB, among others.
‘I was surprised,’ she admits as we take our leave of Rothschild (who has his own lunch guests) and move to our table. Not so much, she continues, because unlike Hindmarch and Sir Anthony, she hasn’t been very involved in Conservative party politics (though she did meet George Osborne in 2006 when they sat together on a council for British enterprise) but because of, ‘Well, who I am.’
For instance, I say, because when you google ‘Tamara Mellon’, one of the first things that comes up is a profile in Interview magazine, published earlier this year, which was accompanied by a Terry Richardson portrait of her naked, lying on a couch with her head thrown back, smoking a cigarette and holding a cat over her nether regions?
‘Yes!’ she laughs, completely ignoring the menu. ‘I could not believe the Daily Mail used [the trade envoy appointment] as an occasion to reprint that picture – especially because Terry holds the rights, so I thought I was safe, because he’d never sell it. But they just took it! Now he’s made them take it down, and it’s off the Interview website, but still.’
Did you really not think that would get out? I ask. Could Mellon, who has had numerous newspapers print paparazzi shots of her snatched while (one example) sunbathing topless on holiday with a former boyfriend, Christian Slater, really be that naive?
‘It has such a niche audience, Interview,’ she shrugs. ‘It’s such a specific thing. I really didn’t.’ And despite my obvious incredulity, she opens up her blue eyes and rolls them at herself and insists she really was that uncynical. And I kind of believe her.
Besides, the prime minister and his gang don’t appear to mind – at least they haven’t said anything to her – and neither did TowerBrook, the private equity company that currently owns Jimmy Choo, when the story was first published. ‘It went over very well, apparently,’ laughs Mellon, as though she can’t quite believe it herself. After all, normally, if a member of a global company’s C-suite were to pose naked, the resulting outcry would involve not only questions of propriety but probably shrieks about questionable judgement and requests to step down. That’s what I would think, anyway. But then I – like the maître d’ – would be mistaken. Besides – ‘We should order!’ Mellon cries.
It’s been 20 minutes since we moved tables, and a waiter is hovering. I thought she just wasn’t hungry. ‘I’d like the tuna carpaccio and the Dover sole,’ she says, which is a main course more than anticipated (as expected, however, there is no wine involved, only Diet Coke; this is New York, after all, and she’s been sober for ‘about 15 years’). I ask for the tuna, and tack on some soup to keep her company. Mellon may be skinny, but she eats: the day after we meet, which happens to also be Thanksgiving, she is planning to have lunch with the retired couturier Valentino Garavani, followed by Thanksgiving dinner with her ex-husband’s family.
She has effectively been absorbed into the Mellon clan; they are one of the reasons she moved from London to New York in 2008: so that her eight-year-old daughter, Araminta, could be closer to her father and his tribe. Although Mellon was close to her own father, Vidal Sassoon co-founder Tommy Yeardye (he was her earliest champion, giving her $150,000 to start Jimmy Choo), she has called her mother, Ann, ‘a sociopath’, and since her father’s death in 2004 no longer speaks to her, or her two younger brothers.
Living in New York also helps Mellon to avoid the paparazzi. And the United States is one of Jimmy Choo’s biggest markets.
‘I knew, from the start, that we needed to be in the US because of the buying power here,’ she says as the tuna is deposited in front of us. ‘You can’t be global without America, and I always wanted to be global. It normally takes a British brand 20 years to get across the ocean, but we opened three stores in America between our second and third years in business, and we were able to do it because of what we did by coming to the Oscars and having the shoe suite.’ In what has now become an annual tradition, Mellon famously set up shop in the Peninsula Hotel the week before the academy awards and hand-dyed shoes to match celebrities’ gowns, one of the first brands to exploit the power of the red carpet.
‘But we were only able to do it because at that time my father was my investor. Can you imagine saying to a banker, “I want to spend all this money and give the shoes for free”? They’d say, “You’re crazy,” and refuse. But when he worked with Vidal Sassoon, he had him cutting hair on stage in Japan, so he understood.’
Her father taught Mellon, she says, ‘to trust my instincts. I think that’s my
biggest strength. People who are over-educated become risk-averse.’ Given that Mellon did not go to university, this is not an unexpected statement. She elaborates: ‘Money guys can look back at what you’ve sold and come up with a plan for future growth, but they can’t pick the product that will put the numbers on the paper. I can do that, and my job is to make them understand that.’
She speaks from experience. In 2001, deciding that they wanted to buy out Jimmy Choo, the eponymous cobbler of the business whose dream (nice shoes for a few nice women) had diverged from Mellon’s (global domination led by fashion-hungry trend-setters), Mellon and her father began to look for outside investment. They sold a 51 per cent stake of the company to private equity firm Phoenix Equity Partners, who held on to it until 2004, when they sold it to Lion Capital, who held on to it for three years, and then sold it to TowerBrook (Mellon has retained 17 per cent). This makes Jimmy Choo the most successful fashion/private equity story in the industry, not just in the UK but globally: though private equity has had a millennial flirtation with fashion, few funds have been able to make the unpredictable style cycles work with their traditional strategy of holding a company for three to five years. The global private equity firm TPG, for example, held on to the Swiss shoe and leather goods maker Bally for nine years after it struggled to restructure the brand following its purchase in 1999.
‘It’s the numbers,’ Mellon says now. ‘You make your numbers, and they’re happy. So even though the private equity guys might not understand what you’re doing – and what I do is very intangible to them – they start to trust you.’
Still, she admits as the Dover sole appears, it’s exhausting. ‘Just as you get to know one board, they sell you, and you have to start all over again.’ You have to, for example, start again with explaining things such as the importance of ‘hair and make-up’, she says, ‘which they just don’t get’. You have to teach them the danger of underestimating, or making assumptions, about the creative side.
‘I was young, and didn’t really understand what private equity was when we sold the first time,’ she continues. ‘In retrospect, I wish I had been my own private equity firm and just gone to the bank and asked them to lend me the money I needed.’
Today, however, ‘I couldn’t buy the whole company now if I wanted,’ even though she’s worth about £102m, and she does want. Instead, TowerBrook, entering the end of its three-year cycle, is in the midst of a ‘strategic evaluation’, where they are trying to decide what happens next: whether they sell to another private equity firm, or take Jimmy Choo public, or hold on to the brand. Mellon won’t commit to any scenario, though she does say that, having been on the Revlon board since 2008, she has seen at first hand the difficulties being a public company entails. Whatever happens, she hopes the owners will commit to a long-term strategy that she is currently devising.
‘I think it takes 30 years to build a luxury brand,’ she says, eating half her fish and then asking for coffee, ‘so we’re part-way through. And there’s so much I want to do. I think we can become a lifestyle brand, because one thing doing the collaboration last year with [high-street retail chain] H&M showed us was that consumers would accept any product from us: we did men’s wear, we did women’s wear, we did jewellery. And I want to do all of that.’
She means this literally: a perfume will launch next year, followed by men’s shoes, followed by children’s wear, watches, jewellery, homeware, and so on. Perhaps as a security strategy during the next phase of the brand, she is the ‘face’ of the perfume, and will appear in the advertising campaign (clothed) with her head thrown back to expose her neck. It’s not the only self-exposure she is considering.
For, as we walk out, Mellon mentions she would like to write a book. An autobiography. ‘There’s been so much nonsense said about me, I figure I should just get it out,’ she says. All of it? I ask. The naked truth?
‘All of it,’ she smiles. Then she mentions she knows a filmmaker who told her if she ever did tell her story, he’d like to make the movie.
Who?
Before you guess Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn, know this: the answer is Peter Morgan, author of high-minded talk fests Frost/Nixon and The Queen.
THE FOUR SEASONS
99 East 52nd Street, Manhattan
* * *
3 x soda water $13.50
1 x crudités $10
2 x tuna carpaccio $50
1 x consommé $16
1 x Dover sole $65
1 x coffee $6
1 x cappuccino $6
* * *
Total (incl. tax and service) $181.29
* * *
11 OCTOBER 1997
Twiggy
‘My eyes were a work of art, I can tell ya’
The FT found Twiggy to be a model celebrity, despite a life which makes strange reading
By Lucy Kellaway
I am eating lunch with a woman so famous that her picture has been put in a rocket and sent into space, and what are we talking about? We are discussing dressmaking tips, in particular the importance of pressing each seam as you go along.
I had not expected to find Twiggy Lawson, as she is now known, quite so down to earth. For a start, her choice of restaurant was not promising. We were to meet at San Lorenzo’s, which was the favourite lunch place of Diana, Princess of Wales, and is frequented by the super-rich and the super-thin. There was also the matter of the photograph. Twiggy’s PR had warned that she was particular about who took her picture, and the FT’s photographer would not be acceptable.
Yet the woman who came down the stairs to meet me showed no signs of being tiresome. Dressed in a simple black trouser suit and ageing white T-shirt, she looked relatively normal against the Di-lookalikes around us. In easy confidential manner, she started telling me about her daughter’s A-levels, about how she had left her purse at home, and wasn’t going to be able to go to Peter Jones after lunch to buy an anniversary present for her husband, Leigh Lawson.
If it hadn’t been for her face – still ridiculously recognizable after three decades – I could almost have been having lunch with the woman next door.
She glanced at the menu, a handwritten sheet bizarrely attached with Blue Tac to a raffia place-mat. ‘I’ll probably have something light – a spinach and avocado salad. They do a lovely chicken on a griddle with mashed potato, but I couldn’t eat that much at lunch.’
So I ordered the chicken, and she chose the salad, with water to drink.
‘’Ello!’ she suddenly called out, the old Neasden accent still in evidence. A small, stout Italian woman came up to the table and kissed her warmly. ‘This is Mara, who runs this marvellous restaurant.’ Mara picked up the copy of Twiggy’s autobiography from the seat beside me, and stroked the picture on the front cover.
‘When I first met her she was just 16 and sat at that table over there,’ Mara told me. ‘She was wearing a fox.’
‘No, I think it was a raccoon,’ interrupted Twiggy, as if it were essential to get these details right. ‘I got it in Portobello Road. Or was I wearing the Ossie Clark?’
‘I had never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life,’ Mara crooned, while Twiggy gushed back, ‘Oh, you are so sweet.’
‘Mara’s hysterical,’ Twiggy whispered after the patron had gone. ‘If she doesn’t like people she won’t let them in.’ She gave a shriek of laughter, surprisingly loud: ‘Argh! Ha! Ha!’
Twiggy tells me how close Mara was to Princess Diana. ‘She’ll be badly missed. We were on holiday when we heard the news. I only met her once, but we came back because we wanted to be here. For days we just walked around unable to concentrate.’
I muttered something about Twiggy having had her own hounding from the press, but she protested.
‘It was nothing like that. I tasted it a little bit in the 1960s in New York. I was so young and little I thought I would get squashed. I was six and a half stone. Argh! Ha! Ha!’
Why has she suddenly decided to write
an autobiography? I asked. ‘I didn’t write it myself,’ she corrected me. ‘I can’t write at all. I sing, I dance, I sew, I act. That’s enough.’ She says this in a funny voice in order to suggest that she is not boasting. ‘Penelope [the ghost writer] and me spent hours and hours talking. I did get sick of me own voice and me life after six months of it.’
Her life makes strange reading. In her version she was happy to be famous, and equally happy to be no longer so. When she visited Los Angeles at the age of 17, Sonny and Cher gave a party for her and everybody was there, desperate to catch a glimpse of the world’s first supermodel.
Now she is lucky to get parts in TV dramas and minor plays. She has never been remotely self-destructive, never taken any drugs. ‘I think it was because I had a normal background and a normal mum and dad,’ she explained; an odd assertion given that her mum was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her childhood.
‘And maybe because I was so young it went over my head. I don’t spend hours analysing it and thinking about it. I’m a wife, a mum, an actress. I’m talking about the past now because my book is coming out. But otherwise, you get up, make breakfast. I never think, “Wow! That was an amazing life I had.” If you did, there would be something very, very wrong with you.’
But surely there is something very wrong with most celebrities?
‘Two of our best friends are Paul and Linda McCartney. I don’t know if you’ve met him?’ she asked, as if that were likely. ‘But think about what they have lived through. And he is so normal and their kids are so wonderful. We know some famous people who are normal and some famous people who are a pain. But then, I know a lot of ordinary people who are a pain. So in the end, it’s the people, isn’t it? I think. I don’t know. Can’t answer that question.’
She puts a couple of spinach leaves in her mouth and calls for some bread. I had finished mine, which was neither as special as she had promised, nor as large.
Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Page 15