Raf Simons did this beautifully when he went into the archives at Dior and put a modern twist on it. So did Diane von Furstenberg, who relaunched her business with the wrap dress, only with modern proportions. She made the collar smaller and the width not so A-line.
For Halston, it would be no great stretch of the imagination to take the Bianca Jagger white trouser suit and re-create it with modern proportions. Before Halston, everything was very tight and fitted coming out of the sixties. It was very difficult to buy something off the rack, so women of means often had their clothes made. With jersey, the loose fabric he used, you could roll up the dress and put it in your suitcase, get somewhere, hang it up, and it was fine. His clothes were modern, sporty, easy, and convenient. If we brought back the asymmetrical jersey dress, I knew that every woman vacationing on the Med or in the Hamptons would buy them in multiple colors.
At my recommendation we hired Bonnie Takhar as CEO, and it didn’t take long before she and I came to the same conclusion that Hilco’s people were all wrong. They were debt collectors, not fashion people, and most of all they weren’t treating us right.
Bonnie and I met at the Mercer Hotel and I suggested that we push for a management buyout. So we spoke to D. E. Shaw, the hedge fund managers, about getting help with the financing. Then I went back to London and set up a conference call with Harvey and Bonnie.
“Harvey, I want you to know that we’re not happy,” I said. “I have a backing in D. E. Shaw, and the whole management team is going to walk in twenty-four hours if we don’t get what we want.”
He went ballistic. “I will destroy you,” he started screaming. “I’ll go on a PR campaign and I’ll destroy you!
I said, “Good luck with that, Harvey. You’re in my industry now.”
• • • •
IN APRIL, JIMMY CHOO ANNOUNCED that Josh Schulman was our choice for CEO.
The same month I received a subpoena to testify at Matthew’s trial. I knew the press would be all over this, so I asked Mark Bolland, a major figure in UK public relations, to go with me.
The proceedings were at Southwark Crown Court, a clinical-looking, contemporary brick building near Tower Bridge, just south of the river. The trial was a huge affair, with a total of eighteen defendants, and I appeared on May 3, the seventh day of testimony.
The issue, at least insofar as Matthew was concerned, was whether or not he should be held criminally responsible for authorizing the illegal hacking of my computer during our divorce. There was no question that he’d given the indicted investigators £12,000 and that he’d signed the contract and authorization they had asked him to sign. But that still left the issue of criminal responsibility, as in knowing what was going on, knowing that it was illegal, and then doing it anyway.
When I saw him on trial, my heart went out to him. I thought, “Oh boy. You’re really in over your head this time.” In fact, he was facing five years.
As the victim of Matthew’s supposed crime, I was actually called as a witness for the prosecution. The prosecutor had me relate all that had happened, including the appearance of the Trojan horse e-mail on my computer, the one that promised to provide me with “things on your soon-to-be ex-husband.”
But then when Matthew’s defense counsel, Nicholas Purnell, began to question me, the discussion took a marked detour into Matthew’s habits of mind. This was no time to gild the lily, so I simply told the truth. I said that being married to Matthew was like having another child. I said that he couldn’t keep up with his bills or bank accounts and that he missed planes the way other people miss buses. When Purnell asked about Matthew’s reading habits and powers of concentration, I simply said that my husband couldn’t manage a comic book, much less a legal document.
The courtroom erupted.
I left the building mobbed by paparazzi, and the next day, the story was on page one of literally every newspaper in London, most of them quoting my comment about Matthew’s inability to cope with a comic book.
The whole trial took six weeks, with the jury deliberating for five days. Two of the detectives were convicted, but happily Matthew was not.
Josh began work as Jimmy Choo CEO in June. In one of our first conversations I told him, “My title is president. But clearly I’m leading the creative process, so I think it’s misleading and confusing for the industry.” So we changed my title to chief creative officer. I liked what I saw of Josh at our first board meeting. Given all the delays, I was still working on the collaboration with Richard Phillips, appropriating one of his images for a “magazine” clutch bag, and the board was still uncertain about it. They asked Josh, “Is this a good thing?”
He said, “This is brilliant. This is the kind of thing we should put money behind.”
And so we did, launching the line at Art Basel Miami in 2007. The Phillips bags were among our top ten best sellers, and now you see everyone doing this kind of collaboration with artists.
Josh also “got” the inspiration trips. He understood how important it was for the design team to be together and do these trips together to create the right kind of flow. When you’re traveling and seeing things, you don’t know what you’re looking for until it hits you. Then, if you’re lucky, the floodgates open.
For the first time since the initial Phoenix deal, it looked like we were going to have someone in charge who understood the business.
I took Josh on a tour of the stores and we talked about market niches where I saw the greatest untapped potential. One of these was ballet flats, which were a big business, and we weren’t doing them well enough at all. I’d also wanted to do a biker boot for years, and a moccasin boot with fringe. I met with huge resistance on the biker boot—mostly from Sandra, oddly enough, who kept telling me we couldn’t afford it—but at last I prevailed, and it became our third-best seller ever, moving five hundred thousand units.
Josh was also keen on orchestrating product, PR, advertising, and marketing. Raul Martinez, founder and chief creative officer of the ad agency AR, as well as creative consultant to American Vogue, was brought in to help shape the look of each campaign. He hired Terry Richardson to do the shoot at the Plaza, and it was Charlotte Pilcher’s inspiration to have Angela Lindvall in the boots.
Ed Filipowski of the PR firm KCD was brought in to help with global strategy, even as we were opening stores in Cannes, Barcelona, Rome, São Paulo, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo.
On June 25, Josh and I went to L.A. to open a new store on Rodeo Drive. We threw a bash that was such a great success that the fire marshal showed up and shut us down. Luckily, we’d already planned to segue to a dinner for a selected few at the home of Wendi Murdoch.
Meanwhile, Halston’s board ratified enough of our demands that Bonnie and I stayed on. She invested half a million, and I put in two.
After we’d reached our agreement and comity returned, one of the Hilco guys turned to me and said, “So now. . . . are you girls going to behave?”
Here was another moment when I should have simply walked out. In certain circles, it appears the only options for dealing with a woman are either to control her or to belittle her. But I still hadn’t found my voice.
Halston needed the right designer, so we went on an extensive search. We talked to Peter Dundas, who’s now at Pucci, and to Hedi Slimane, who’s now at Yves Saint Laurent. He’d only designed menswear, but I thought he’d be great. Even though I had concerns about how well he could work with the investors, I would have given up huge equity to have him.
American Vogue recommended Marco Zanini, who at the time was working directly with Donatella Versace. We met up in London and he showed me his sketches, and then he invited me to his last show for them in Milan, which was very Halston inspired. “I just wanted you to see this. I did this for you,” he said.
We hired him and set up offices downtown.
• • • •
IN FEBRUARY
2007, WE MOVED the Jimmy Choo offices from Ixworth Place to Lancer Square. We went from 3,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet of office space, and, as in the stores, the design was all very clean, with the same beige and lilac. Our back office was much larger now, with a much bigger PR department, finance department, and merchandising department.
Despite my role in representing the brand to the public, my focus was still very much on the product. We were hiring more designers and more assistants, but we were also introducing more collections—fall/winter and spring/summer, and now also a Cruise or Resort Collection, which hit the stores in November, and a pre-fall, which appeared in June. Considering the amount of work we were doing, it was still a very small design team.
Even a small team requires management, though, and we all know the well-worn descriptor for managing creatives: herding cats.
The hoariest management cliché, though, is that it’s lonely at the top, which persists because the typical CEO manages through fear, remaining a distant authority figure, capable of screaming and throwing fits, firing you in a heartbeat, or bestowing undreamed-of privileges. It’s very clear that you’re not working with him; you’re working for him.
My role was much more ambiguous. I was in and out, going to the Oscars and to meetings with bankers, then coming back to the design room and rubbing elbows. I certainly was not a remote and a fear-inducing authority figure. At times, I appeared to be simply “one of them,” and yet I also got special attention and special privileges—all of which could lead to resentment, which, of course, Robert had encouraged and tried to exploit in his attempt to divide and conquer.
Some of the time, certain people on the team were still deliberately dismissive, as if they were saying, “We’ve got the word on you.” This made trying to come back out from under Robert’s slander campaign like fighting a clique of “mean girls.” Then again, I know that my remoteness, that residue of “vacant” Tamara from my actual school days, can be misinterpreted and perhaps off-putting.
Fortunately, we also had some grown-ups on the team, like Elisabeth Guers, our head shoe designer, an amazing Frenchwoman who never fell for the Robert bullshit. Neither did Alvaro, the bag designer. He told me that Robert had called him once and asked if the company could survive without Tamara. He’d said, “No.”
I also had Charlotte Pilcher, the stylist I’d worked for in the early days, and whom I’d brought on board as my creative right hand during the end of the Robert era, when I really needed a friend. She was also another pair of very experienced and savvy eyes that I trusted completely, and she became a part of all of our design meetings.
During this period, Minty would occasionally sit in as well. She’d sketch shoes, and then we’d pin her designs up on the wall. Her favorite movie from this era was The Devil Wears Prada, and it may have gone to her head. She’d come in and collect employees’ phone extensions and write up a list of their names and numbers. Then she’d ring them up and tell them they were fired. Thank God the staff saw the humor in it.
• • • •
IN THE FALL OF 2007, Amanda Kyme, who was working for us one day a week on celebrity gifting, called to say that there was a man she wanted me to meet. Christian Slater was in town doing a play called Swimming with Sharks. She said he didn’t know anyone, and she wanted to introduce us.
I knew the name from the movies Heathers and True Romance and the like, but I said, “Oh God, Amanda, no actors. No rock stars, please.”
She said, “Oh come on, come on. Just have dinner with him. I think you’ll actually get on.”
I looked at my diary and I said, “I have something every night for the next two weeks. Except Wednesday, I guess. A friend of mine is having a dinner. Matthew Vaughn, he’s a producer. I guess Christian could come to that.”
So I met him at his hotel and he came to the dinner, and actually, we got on really well. And then every night after that, whenever he’d finish rehearsal, he’d kind of show up. We had a few more dinners, he sent me flowers, and the relationship took off from there. He was in London for six months, and we actually ended up spending pretty much every night together.
I don’t know why Amanda thought it would be a match. Another reformed bad boy, I suppose. He’d done his time with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and now he was clean and sober.
Divorced, he had two kids about the same age as Minty, a boy and a girl. He lived in a house in Brentwood owned by the mother of a guy he met in rehab, so it was all very arrested development, which was a little worrying. They lived in the bedrooms meant for children, which for me had echoes of the basement in Belgravia. The guy whose mother owned the house served as Christian’s assistant/manager/best friend. Also in the house was the guy’s girlfriend from South Carolina, who was even less sophisticated than he, and I think the two of them spent a great deal of time worrying that I was going to take Christian away from them. When I visited L.A., Christian would stay with me at the Peninsula, and we’d watch episodes of Entourage. We were in on the joke.
Christian was great for that moment in time, but fundamentally we had very different worldviews, and we wanted different things. He’d grown up in New York, where his father was an actor and his mother was a casting director and producer, and he’d been in the business his whole life. But he had very simple tastes. I went to baseball games with him, trying to be a good sport, but I have to say I was bored out of my mind the whole time. Hot dogs? Cracker Jack? Not for me.
In the middle of our relationship, I was forced to hire Bert Fields and file a civil suit against my mother in California. We still had not resolved the question of the 32,000 shares allocated to the wrong trust, the millions misallocated supposedly to protect my assets during the divorce, and the completely gratuitous £4 million in cash frozen because of the dispute—all of which led to some very nasty letters between my mother’s lawyers and mine.
Occasionally, either side would make a proposal. Mine was to put the money at issue in a trust for Minty. Essentially, I told my mother, “You don’t touch it, I don’t touch it. It goes straight to the trust, and then your granddaughter gets the benefit instead of these lawyers.”
But my mother wouldn’t do that. Her response was always, “No, no. If anything ever happens to Tamara, we’ll look after that little girl,” words that filled me with horror.
Their counterproposal was to set up Marqueta II, a separate trust designation for charity. They even proposed the Elton John AIDS Foundation as beneficiary, which showed that they’d done their homework. But the way it was to be set up, they could shift the money back over into my mother’s trust anytime they pleased. So the conversation went nowhere.
The whole affair felt like a chronic illness, with pathogens from my mother trapped in my body. I was so tense that my back was always going out on me. Sometimes it felt as if a giant snake were wrapped around me to keep me from taking a full breath.
• • • •
OUR FIRST HALSTON SHOW WAS in February 2008, but not even this legendary brand could sustain the burden of all our dreams and anxieties. In setting up the company, the investors had spent $3 million just on legal documents, so they were feeling strained and nervous going in. And then the first reviews were less than stellar.
After the catwalk, and before the buyers came by for closer inspection, Bonnie took it upon herself to redesign the collection. She mixed and matched and moved everything around and it was awful. Selfridges had been negotiated previously based on the hype, but orders from the show itself were weak.
Pure panic soon set in. I was in the airport on the way back to London when the screaming phone calls began, and no one can scream like Harvey.
The trouble with Mr. Weinstein is that he never trusts the people he hires. He’ll go out and ask everyone what he or she thinks, so he gets a dozen different opinions, often conflicting, and then he blows hot and cold every which way from one notion to the next. So,
as if things weren’t bad enough already, his next impulse was to set up an advisory board that, fortunately, never came into being.
On the creative side, all was not sweetness and light. Rachel’s primary job was to shop for vintage Halston in L.A., but an article in Harper’s Bazaar London quoted her to the effect that she was the creative director, which clearly upset Marco.
Bonnie was, in fact, driving our designer nuts with contradictory directives, second-guessing, and interventions, her relationship with Rachel was deteriorating, and I must confess I did not have my eye on the ball, too busy with Jimmy Choo, among other matters. I was so exhausted and overloaded that the best I could do was to ask Rachel to back away, which I’ve always felt really bad about because it made her seem the scapegoat.
And that was just the first season. There would be more to come.
• • • •11• • • •
In the spring of 2008 Christian and I were in New York and, on an impulse, I said, “Let’s just go out and have a look at the market and see what’s out there. See what apartments are selling for.”
I’d been thinking about relocating to New York for some time, but I hadn’t really been ready to buy, and then I fell in love. Edgar Bronfman Jr. was selling the top two floors of a small structure on the Upper East Side. Built in 1913, it had once been a private academy. It reminded me so much of my apartment in London that I bought it on a whim.
With Christian living in L.A., certainly New York had advantages over London as a base for me. But there was more to the idea than that. At the time it just seemed that everything was pushing me toward the city, particularly with regard to Minty. I had no family left in London, and when Matthew and I got divorced, he ended up moving to New York, and I think it is very important for girls to grow up with their dads. I also found it difficult not to have an extended family because when I had to travel for business, there was no one around for Minty but the nanny. If we were living in New York, she’d not only have her dad, she’d have uncles and aunts and cousins. We’d already been going to Rolling Rock each year, the Mellon estate in Pennsylvania where she gets to meet dozens and dozens of other little Mellons. It was important to me that she would grow up with a sense of belonging to something more than just the two of us.
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 17