In My Shoes: A Memoir by Tamara Mellon, William Patrick

confide about the madness she’d been experiencing.
    “Do you think I should see a psychiatrist?” she asked me.
    I’d been through a spate of therapy myself, of course, and I’d found it quite helpful, so immediately I said yes. Obviously she was suffering from the consequences of a very twisted relationship with her uncle, and she needed a dispassionate observer to help her sort it out. Jimmy had helped her when she first came to London, but he’d been manipulating her sense of obligation ever since, as well as any guilt she mayhave felt for no longer being at his beck and call. So she got some professional help, and she lived with me for about a year, and after a while she seemed fine.
    Jimmy stayed in his shop during that year, and his only contact with Sandra was through forwarding her mail. When it arrived I could see Chinese characters scrawled across the envelopes in pencil. I asked her, “What does this mean?”
    “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 appealto 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 MonicaBoulevard. 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