Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (20 page)

A tureen of soup – carrot, with seaweed and bulgar – is brought in by a waiter in a white coat. As the guest, I am served first. I mention this, because it will become an issue later. ‘This is good,’ says Dolce.

‘Mmm,’ says Gabbana.

‘Cheese?’ says Dolce, proffering some shaved dairy products in a silver bowl. Gabbana gives him a look.

This is one of the last meals they will have in their current headquarters: they are moving to a new building next to the old Metropol theatre, a classic, mirrored venue they bought a few years ago and transformed for their runway shows. Renovations have been going on for three years, pausing briefly during the onset of Italy’s financial crisis. The two men say they approve, generally, of what Mario Monti’s government is doing to address the country’s fiscal woes. This despite the fact they are facing a trial over a charge of alleged tax evasion (‘We know we did nothing wrong,’ says Gabbana. ‘These things just take a long time’), and have been affected by a new law that means no establishment may accept cash over €1,000. ‘We lost so much money in the sales,’ says Gabbana. ‘People come, they want to buy with cash, we tell them, “No, we need a charge card,” and they leave without anything.’

‘It’s the right thing to do, though,’ says Dolce. ‘Think of all the manicurists who have been taking cash and not paying the right taxes. OK, one, on its own, it’s nothing. But all of them together …’

‘This is one of the ways we have changed the most since the beginning,’ says Gabbana. ‘We have learnt there is a time for everything.’

‘Before we wanted everything immediately: fast, fast, fast,’ agrees Dolce, having some more soup. ‘We were like a machine. Well, I am still like a machine. But now my machine can wait.’

Dolce designed the new building (architecture is his domain) but Gabbana has not yet been inside. ‘He won’t let me in,’ he says, waving a hand at Dolce. They will share an office, as they do now.

‘About three or four years ago, I thought, “I am exhausted by seeing you all the time!” ’ says Gabbana. ‘I mean, this is the conversation: he says, “I want yellow.” But I want blue. And then he says, “This shirt is giving me a headache,” and, of course, I have to say, “It’s my fault?” and then he says—’

‘No, it’s not your fault,’ smiles Dolce.

‘So I said I wanted my own office in the next place. But then, in the end, we have one big room.’

A waiter brings a tray of steamed fish, seaweed, broccoli rabe and fennel. I take some – normally I like just one course at lunch but I was taught that when you are a guest in someone’s house, you eat what you are served and this is Italy, where meals matter – but when the waiter gets to Dolce and Gabbana, they wave him away.

‘I ate too much soup,’ says Dolce.

‘Me too,’ says Gabbana. ‘That was very filling.’ I look at the food on my plate and feel a bit silly. I am the only one eating, which in the fashion world is pretty weird. Still, this means the designers can continue their dialogue without worrying about food coming out of their mouths, so maybe they have an ulterior motive. Either way, they have manipulated the scene effectively to their own advantage.

‘The worst time for us was when we broke up but kept working together,’ says Gabbana. ‘We thought about splitting up, but no. And the truth is, everything is exactly the same. But no sex!’

‘No sex,’ agrees Dolce.

‘I can’t work without him,’ says Gabbana. ‘Maybe one day there will be a Dolce collection and a Gabbana collection—’

‘No. Never,’ says Dolce. ‘This is my destiny.’

‘Never say never,’ scolds Gabbana.

This is also what both say when the subject of an initial public offering comes up. It is conventional fashion business wisdom that, to be competitive globally, Italian family-run companies must either turn to big groups (Bulgari has just been bought by LVMH), go public (Ferragamo) or take private equity investment (Moncler). Dolce & Gabbana – with revenues in 2011 of €1.1bn – is widely viewed as an attractive candidate for any of the above. ‘When people ask if we are going public, we think, “Why?” ’ says Gabbana. ‘For about six months, banks kept coming to talk to us.’

‘But we don’t want the money,’ says Dolce. ‘Tomorrow we could change our minds if we needed it to expand but, at the moment, we don’t. We do need to grow a bit more. We have a lot of plans.’

Though they closed their younger, more accessible D&G line in September, they tell me it was to stop causing confusion with their main line, not for financial reasons. They want to open 30 stores in China over the next two years, as well as others in São Paulo and New York. They have also become something of a mini-publishing house, producing coffee-table books in conjunction with publishers such as Rizzoli and Taschen. Their dream is to be a ‘
maison
, like Chanel. But maybe we need to die first,’ says Gabbana.

‘And then Karl [Lagerfeld] could come in and do the collections!’ says Dolce.

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?

4 DECEMBER 2010

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.’