“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.
Then on July 5, 1998, we made our first appearance on Sex and the City and our visibility skyrocketed. The script had Carrie Bradshaw running for the Staten Island Ferry when she stumbles and screams out, “I lost my Choo!” The “Choo” she lost was in fact a style with tiny feathers we called the “Marlene.”
That one mention helped turn us into a household name. Suddenly women who’d never heard of us, women who lived in small towns in the American heartland, thought about us in the same heady company as the other luxury brands being mentioned, brand names like Prada and Gucci and, admittedly, Manolo Blahnik. But the most amazing aspect of this turn of events was that, while manufacturers of everything from diapers to diet drinks pay fortunes for product placement in movies and TV, we got this huge call-out entirely for free. Years later I spoke with Candace Bushnell, the show’s creator, and she said she put the refe
rence in the script because she’d been in London and stopped by the store on Motcomb Street and fell in love with the product. Ultimately, Jimmy Choo would be mentioned on the show thirty-four times.
In London, when we did our first sale at our little shop, there was a line around the block. Women were literally fighting each other to get in, and I had to put my brother at the door to serve as bouncer, letting in just a few customers at a time. The shoes were sexy. They were fun. They had interesting detail and color, and our factories were producing real quality at a price point between £250 and £400.
Three thousand miles away in Manhattan, we found retail space in Olympic Tower, on Fifty-First just off Fifth Avenue. St. Patrick’s Cathedral faces the entrance across Fifty-First, Saks is one block south, and all the luxury boutiques are clustered right there along the avenue, so Olympic Tower allowed us to be in the center of Manhattan’s most exclusive retail district without having to pay for a Fifth Avenue address.
To run the new store, we brought in Michael Stachowski, who had been the Giorgio’s buyer and the first (and only) one to buy off our sketches at that first, wretched FFANY. To launch our new East Coast location, we hired Harrison and Shriftman to do PR, and we threw a huge party hosted by Lucy Sykes, the fashion editor of Marie Claire, and her twin sister Plum from American Vogue, who’d been a features assistant alongside me at British Vogue.
Our plan for North American conquest did not initially include Las Vegas, but an unsolicited offer came in from the developers of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. They were creating a 500,000-square-foot shopping destination called the Grand Canal Shoppes, and supposedly Neiman Marcus was going to be their anchor. That never happened, and the other brands they said would be coming in never materialized. But we signed on and the location did okay, and then after a while we moved on to a spot inside Caesars Palace.
So now we had three North American stores—L.A., New York, and Las Vegas—and eight employees. I did all the buying for the US stores—the London company sold to the US subsidiary at 25 percent off wholesale—and Philip’s people did all the billing, shipping, and accounting. Even so, it seemed that I was constantly shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, and across the four North American time zones. Jet lag was to become a permanent condition.
• • • •
FOR THE 1999 ACADEMY AWARDS ceremony, Sandra and I flew to L.A. with sixty pairs of shoes in half a dozen different styles, but only in black and white. At that time, fashion was still all about matching, and my idea was to dye the shoes to match the dress. This was the servicing of celebrities at a whole new level, light-years beyond the gift bag.
We took a suite at L’Ermitage Beverly Hills on Burton Way and, to save money, shared it with Nadja Swarovski, a longtime purveyor of fine crystal. Marilyn arranged a tea, and we sent word to all the stylists, the agents, and the managers, inviting them to come to the suite. We showed them what we had to offer—shoes in every size and style—but all in white satin. Then we explained how we would go the extra mile, dying any pair on-site to match the color of any dress.
We flew over a woman from London who knew about dyes, but even so we were up all night, mixing the colors in the hotel bathtub, struggling to get the shades exactly right, then applying the color to the satin with a sponge. Julianne Moore changed her dress at the last minute, which meant that we had to re-dye her shoes, which meant that she went out on the red carpet with wet feet.
Phillip Bloch, who dressed stars like Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry, and Sandra Bullock, came to the tea and asked that we send over a box of shoes and bags for Salma Hayek. The fashion director of the awards themselves, L’Wren Scott, ordered shoes for all the pretty young things who would be assisting the stars on and offstage. The list of actresses who wore Jimmy Choo that year included Geena Davis, Rachel Griffiths, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lopez, Minnie Driver, Julianne Moore, Hilary Swank, and Uma Thurman.
Cate Blanchett was up for Best Actress for Elizabeth, and her stylist, Jessica Paster, asked us to make her a pair of Jimmy Choos covered in diamonds. We contacted Craig Drake, a jeweler in Philadelphia, and asked him to make a diamond bracelet that could become the ankle strap of a shoe. Of course, once we’d arranged to apply forty carats of diamonds to Cate’s eggplant-colored heels, her stylist called to say the shoes were too small.
Marilyn began phoning all over L.A., trying to find a store that carried our label where we could find a replacement for Cate. Saks in West Hollywood had a pair, but they were a half size too small and the wrong color—black. Marilyn drove over and bought them anyway. Then she called shoemaker Jack Zatikian. We drove over to his house in Los Feliz, near Griffith Park, and we stayed up all night as he rebuilt the shoe, then covered it in white satin so it could be dyed. Marilyn showed up the next morning with the diamonds. “Sew them on,” she said.
The story attracted such massive worldwide coverage that the red carpet was almost beside the point. As it turned out, Cate never wore the shoes for fear of being upstaged by her feet. But after the ceremony she auctioned her Jimmy Choos—sans diamonds—as well as her dress, to raise money for the American AIDS Foundation. The outfit went for $15,000. The diamonds were returned to Craig Drake.
We’d been the first brand to set up shop in the L’Ermitage, but by the next year the hotel had become this sort of Moroccan bazaar with shoe designers from high end to Hush Puppies, as well as jewelry designers, makeup and hair products, and designers pushing racks of dresses through the corridors as if they were on Seventh Avenue.
I maintained my aversion to being part of the crowd, so I moved our suite to the Peninsula Beverly Hills on Santa Monica, just off Wilshire. But Jack Zatikian remained a regular component of our Oscar strategy, dying the shoes, fixing the straps, and even adding more of a platform—whatever it took to get it right.
The following year, Nadja Swarovski and I collaborated on a special collection, creating seven distinctive shoes embedded with her company’s crystal. These “one of a kind” shoes were prototypes for our next fall line.
• • • •
MAYBE IT WAS THE HOLLYWOOD influence, but back in London I started getting a little splashier in how we presented the brand. When Ian Shrager opened one of his first hotels, I did a press day in his restaurant. I took the fish off the ice in his display cases in the main dining room and arranged the shoes there. Visitors got to see not only this glam new venue in London, but how many shoes could be displayed on a bed of ice.
This was also about the time we began working on our first Cruise Collection, resort wear meant to be sold in December, just in time for winter vacations. Sandra’s inspiration was “nautical,” an idea that left me underwhelmed. That’s when I came up with the idea of glitter—in all colors. Pink. Yellow. Blue. And it was a huge hit.
In keeping with our edgier and more exclusive image, we asked Jimmy to move his shop from the dungeon in Hackney to a town house on Connaught Street in Bayswater. This space provided a workshop in the basement, a showroom for his couture clients on the ground floor, and living quarters for his family upstairs. At about the same time we moved our offices to Pont Street, above Jeroboams, the wine shop. I’d received a small bump in salary by now. I hired an assistant, Katherine Drummond, who comes from the Redgrave acting family. In addition, we acquired an actual computer for processing our orders, and I hired a friend, Adrian Harris, to write the code. Even so, it was still Sandra and I who were up all hours entering the orders into the system.
Around this time we also started producing shoes for men. My father wanted to put my brother Daniel in charge of this new line, because he thought Daniel needed a focus. But my brother’s real passion is music, which did not translate so well to working in the fashion industry. So for a while I wound up managing the men’s line in addition to everything else I was doing. Daniel would show up very dutifully at the shop—mostly to please my father—but he would be so hungover that he would g
o and lock himself in the bathroom to take a nap. Hannah, his girlfriend who sold for us, often had to get a ruler and poke him under the door to wake him up.
I’m afraid neither of my brothers inherited my father’s drive. In the Yeardye family, as in so many others, the sons’ level of worldly success seems inversely proportional to the father’s. History shows that inherited wealth has rarely been the spur of great ambition or character development, but sometimes it can help generate extraordinarily colorful eccentricities. As I was about to discover, those eccentricities can sometimes be wonderfully entertaining, at least for a while.
• • • •5• • • •
In May 1998, I attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in London, where I ran into a bunch of old friends who were all going out for dinner afterward. The ringleader was Henry Dent-Brocklehurst, who’d booked a table at La Famiglia. I knew Henry only slightly, and he was very gracious but also full of regret. “I’m so sorry,” he said to me, “but I don’t think there’s any more room.”
I left it at that, and after the meeting I simply went home. Shortly thereafter, someone rang my bell. I opened the door, and there on my threshold I found a young man who looked as if he had taken the proverbial step out of the pages of GQ. He’d been at the NA meeting, where I’d quickly noted that, along with being incredibly handsome, he was an American, and very funny. His name was Matthew Mellon.
“You have to come,” he said. “To the restaurant. We’ll make room. I don’t think you’ll take up all that much room, will you?”
I liked the look of him, and I thought it was very chivalrous that he’d made this special effort to include me, and so I went. The restaurant was around the corner on Elizabeth Street, and as we walked over Matthew was talking a mile a minute, and I must have been laughing the whole time. Even so, there was nothing terribly romantic or “like a first date” about this encounter. It was a perfectly nice evening, and when we were done I simply walked home by myself.
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 7