In My Shoes: A Memoir (22 page)

I was the last one standing, but as I emerged onto those courthouse steps on that gray November day, it was nothing like Rocky Balboa dancing exultantly with arms raised after running up the steps of that museum in Philadelphia. There was no cheering crowd, no sense of exuberance or celebration. I could see nothing but wreckage all around, and I felt empty and alone.

The one silver lining behind all the clouds was that the collaboration with H&M had just appeared in the stores. Coming back to the dismal Longueville Manor on the dismal island of Jersey, I turned on the television and saw lines of people outside the shops. In fact, they’d started lining up at three or four in the morning with sleeping bags. The entire collection sold out within twenty-four hours. H&M said it was the most successful collaboration they’d ever done.

F
or years before the case in Jersey, I’d been having massive anxiety attacks and night sweats. With the trial behind me and even with a positive resolution, none of that went away. In fact, my symptoms ratcheted up to suggest true posttraumatic stress. I couldn’t sleep. I was so distracted that it could take me hours to dress. I couldn’t make decisions or stand to be with people.

After all the storm and stress, I felt it was time for a lark, and it was during this dark period that Karl Templar, the art director of
Interview
magazine, rang me up and said, “We’d love to do a feature with you.” He added, “You look like you’re in such great shape. How about doing the photo nude?”

I thought the suggestion rather cheeky, but I’d already nearly bared my all for “4 Inches.”

“We could get Terry Richardson to shoot,” he went on. “A Jimmy Choo bag or whatever placed strategically. What do you think?”

I thought that having a nude taken while I was young and fit, by one of the best photographers in the world, with one of the best stylists in the world, was an offer that was not going to come around again.

I said yes.

I did the interview, posed for the photo lying on my back with my
Jimmy Choos, a cigarette, and a cat, and then I went to St. Bart’s for the holidays. Unfortunately, the residual anxiety from the past few months came with me. I’d feel it when I woke up, and then it would build throughout the day. I was like the survivor of a near-miss car crash. You drive on, and then afterward, when the excitement and danger have passed, you start to shake.

Through the winter into spring, each month was worse than the one before.

At Easter, at Diane von Furstenberg’s home on Harbour Island in the Bahamas, Matthew married Nicole Hanley, formerly a stylist at Ralph Lauren. They’d been together for quite a while, and I was very happy for them. In fact, they’d launched a fashion line together, Hanley Mellon, in 2008. Now Minty would get to be a bridesmaid, and soon she would have some half siblings to be a part of her life.

I was very keen on surrounding my daughter with as rich a fabric of friends and family as I could, and the reason why was impressed on me very dramatically just a few days after the wedding. I was in London, and I couldn’t get home for Minty’s birthday party because a volcano erupted in Iceland, stranding me and millions of others in clouds of volcanic ash. It was a good lesson in humility. When there’s an act of God of that magnitude, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re in first class or coach, or you have your own plane. You’re not going anywhere.

•  •  •  •

JIMMY CHOO NOW HAD 115
stores and was represented in thirty-nine countries, but the economy was still struggling to come back. In 2009, Josh came up with the idea of relaunching our House Collection,
renaming it 24:7, adding new styles and putting some serious ad money behind it. This meant putting more emphasis on the bottom of the pyramid as far as our collection was concerned, so he wasn’t sure that I’d go along. But I said, “Let’s do it.”

The effort was a huge success, and it triggered an enormous growth spurt, pushing our EBITDA up from £13.5 million in 2006 to £50 million in 2011.

The downside of this explosion in growth was that our owners became greedy, and they began pushing us to improve our margins. They told us we could no longer use leather that cost more that 30 euro a square meter. But luxury brands should only use top-grade leather, which costs at least 50 euro a square meter. They pushed our factories to lower their prices, but they have to make money, too, so they were forced to use cheaper materials and otherwise cut corners in the manufacturing process.

This meant that our 24:7 shoes simply didn’t have the perfect fit we were known for, and the brand overall was losing its fashion-forward edge. Now, 80 percent of Jimmy Choo’s business comes from 24:7.

Alvaro was still designing marvelous bags, but then we’d have a side meeting with merchandising, after which I’d see that the quality was less than we’d initially specified. None of this stopped the product from selling—to the uninitiated it still “looked” like Jimmy Choo—but to me, what we were beginning to produce wasn’t my idea of who we were. I feared we were becoming just another big commercial enterprise.

From Italy, Anna saw the decline in the manufacturing specs being approved. Through her brother Massimo she sent me the message “It’s the beginning of the end.”

The most important part of a luxury brand is innovation, creativity, and quality, but the bean counters that now controlled our destiny gave merchandising too large a voice. They always tend to look backward and then ask for new versions of old styles. But even when you’re paying homage to vintage designs, you have to add that certain spark because fashion keeps moving on. To that point, a cleaner look had supplanted our distinctive hardware, but our merchandising people were afraid to go with the trend.

Their rearview focus became terribly frustrating for me, and then some of the newer people couldn’t properly navigate the boundary between sexy and trashy. Jimmy Choo had always had an element of rock and roll, but it was never campy or tacky.

At Halston, Bonnie “borrowed” the House Collection concept to launch a vintage line she called Halston Heritage. This would be the Halston classics, but at a lower price point. The fact remains that there were just far too many conflicting visions for what Halston should be doing. I had too much on my plate at Jimmy Choo to contribute effectively, so I ended my relationship with Halston, though I did hold on to my shares.

At Jimmy Choo, the greatest surge of creativity often came toward the end of the design process for each collection. Eventually, we found a way to capture this surge, putting together a collection of special pieces called Catwalk, which consisted of these late-breaking inspirations, which we would sell slightly after the main collection. The buyers would have placed their bulk order already, but then they’d come back a few weeks later to buy Catwalk—the 10 percent of their buy that was really fashion forward.

Green shoots had been coming up in the marketplace for the past year or so, the mergers and acquisitions business had come back, and there seemed to be some movement in private equity. Soon enough TowerBrook was actively planning for yet another sale. But very quickly Ramez made it clear that he wanted me to stay out of it.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you your money.”

In the summer of 2010, we hit gold when Madonna was spotted coming out of a restaurant carrying the Jimmy Choo Blythe Leopard-Print Pony Hair Satchel. The publicity was worth millions.

About the same time I got a letter from the prime minister’s office. “You’re not allowed to tell anyone,” it said, “but the Queen is awarding you an Order of the British Empire [OBE] for your contribution to the fashion industry.” They suggested two dates in October for a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, and they asked me to pick one.

When my OBE was reported in the media, I got an e-mail from Ramez saying, “Bravo!”

A few weeks later, in August 2010, Ramez rang me up in the Hamptons to say, “We’re selling without you.”

I’d known this was coming. It was the same old story. In every transaction, my partners tried to sell the company without me, and then every time the buyer demanded that I be part of the deal.

Ramez actually told me that his plan was to tell potential buyers, “We’ve bottled the essence of Tamara, and now we can operate without her.”

This, of course, played into the finance guy’s theory, or fantasy, of how businesses work, which is that no one person is all that important and that all it takes is shrewd management, not a certain level of taste
or a vision for the product, to make a company great. To which I would respond: Tell that to Steve Jobs.

Private equity simply doesn’t want any one personality to have power, especially not someone on the creative side, because creativity threatens them by being unpredictable, and thus uncontrollable. As a result they fear it, and they try to diminish its status.

For all their attempts to throw me under the bus, the irony remained that I was the only individual who had her own money in the game. TowerBrook talked about “owning” the business, but they were just a vague collective that risked other people’s investments and leveraged debt. Ramez had screamed out more than once, “I own this company, not Tamara!” But he had no visceral connection, either in terms of real, personal risk or in terms of concern for the product.

Shortly after the rather abrupt announcement from Ramez, Josh called me up to go over some plans for the year ahead, and somehow in that conversation I let slip, “Look, I might not even be here in a year.”

Almost immediately I got another call from Ramez. Apparently Josh had called him up in a panic, and now Ramez was trying to smooth the waters all round. He was conciliatory, but he made it clear that as we approached the next sale, I was to remain decorative and silent.

•  •  •  •

NOVEMBER WAS MY TIME FOR
affirmations. I flew to New York to receive an Enduring Vision Award from the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Then I flew to London for my moment with the Queen.

I stayed at the Ritz, and I was very moved that David and Frederick Barclay, the owners, and old friends of my dad’s, were on hand to wish
me well. They were very sweet to Minty, telling her how proud her grandfather would have been.

I’ve never felt intimidated by the pressure to look a certain way, but if there ever was a quintessential moment for “looking one’s best,” it would be while appearing before the Queen as a representative of the British fashion industry. I faced the challenge in a vintage-looking Dolce & Gabbana polka-dot dress with a fur collar, and a large, black fedora.

I also invited my old friend Mark Bolland to accompany me. Now a major figure in public relations, Mark had once been deputy private secretary to Prince Charles, so he knew a thing or two about conducting oneself properly. He was the one who improved the prince’s public image after Diana was killed, recasting him as a strong father for William and Harry, working out ground rules with the press to protect the boys’ privacy, then getting a reluctant British public to accept Camilla Parker Bowles.

With a bit of moral support from Mark, I simply followed the rules, and where the Queen is concerned they make it very clear exactly what the rules are. The palace staff provides quite a bit of coaching, but, after all, I’d learned to curtsy at finishing school.

There’s a line of people offstage who are being given the award, and one person is led out at a time. You have to go up and bow or curtsy, and the Queen puts a medal on you. She, of course, has someone behind her whispering in her ear, telling her who you are. As she handed me the award she leaned forward and said, “I hear you make shoes.”

I said, “Yes, mum. And bags, too.”

Then I shuffled away backward because you can’t turn your back on the Queen.

After the ceremony I took the Jimmy Choo team to lunch at Scott’s, and then that night I had a bit of a bash at the Savoy. It was short notice, but Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran was there, as was Philip Green from Topshop and Valentino, as well as Elizabeth Hurley and Elle Macpherson. I had to invite Ramez as a courtesy.

I gave a little speech in which I thanked everyone for coming. I said, “As you’re all aware, my father died not long ago, our family has fallen apart, and I just want you to know that everyone who’s here to celebrate this with me tonight will be etched in my memory forever.”

There was a board meeting the next day, and Ramez was gracious enough to compliment the “human quality” of my speech. During the applause, Robert walked out of the room.

One of the agenda items at that meeting was the opening of a new store at Fifty-First and Fifth, and the need to refurbish others. TowerBrook’s response was, “That’s not going to pay off during our time horizon” so they declined to make the investment. They still cared nothing about the long-term health of the business or the actual quality of the product. The only thing they cared about was protecting their EBITDA.

By this time we all understood their narrow focus perfectly well, but to actually admit to this tunnel vision in front of the management team—that’s what was shocking to me. For the actual managers, Jimmy Choo was their career and their daily bread, and they not only loved the company, they couldn’t possibly do their jobs without thinking about growth and innovation. And then on top of it all, to be told by their board, “We’re simply running in place, waiting to cash out. Oh, but the rest of you . . . steady on! Really push yourselves!”

Our board, of course, was ten guys in suits and me. I’d tried to bring in Kris Thykier, the partner in Matthew Freud’s hugely powerful public relations group, but they wouldn’t have it. They had to be in control. Kris critiqued us once, saying that we needed to coordinate more. I passed along this assessment to Josh, who said that he agreed completely. The change had a huge impact on the business. Which suggests the kind of massive impact Kris could have had if TowerBrook had allowed him on the board.

Then, as if to add insult to my partners’ perceived injury, the prime minister’s office contacted me yet again, this time asking if I would accept a position of trade envoy for Great Britain. Of course I said yes, and the
Daily Mail
used the announcement as an excuse to reprint the nude picture from
Interview
. I think the combination of official honors and tabloid notoriety must have driven the TowerBrook boys absolutely nuts.

The responsibilities of a trade envoy are to go overseas to encourage investment in Britain and to educate British businesses about overseas opportunities and how to go about mastering them.

My first trip was to China to help introduce British brands to the Chinese market and British products to Chinese buyers. Our team was a diverse bunch, ranging from me in fashion to someone who designed airplane engines for Rolls-Royce. We would invite local businesses and do a presentation for Asprey, Aston Martin, Liberty, and so on, each of which had a representative along on the trip. We met with the mayor of Beijing and went to the opening of the design center. Later, I would speak at conferences in Brazil and in London to help entrepreneurs
prepare for success. In New York I did a “British fashion” shoot with Anna Wintour and Victoria Beckham.