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

components—uppers, heels, insoles, as well as the best leathers—come from Italy. All the tanneries and all the leather makers exhibit at the show, and you go around until you find the leather that you like, from the tanneries you like, and then you establish a relationship and these become your regular suppliers. You also see what new colors they’re showing and the new technologies that have come along.
    I was still trying to engage Jimmy—after all, my dad and I had signed over half the company to him—but when I invited him to come with us to Lineapelle, he spent all his time trying to find whatever he could swipe to take home for his couture operation. He was fixated on picking up heels and scraps of leather, never on the big picture.
    Now that we were up and running, my itinerary also included six trips a year just to keep tabs on the manufacturing end of things. So six times a year Sandra and I would fly to Italy, stay in a not particularly great hotel, and have Anna drive us around. We’d spend the day at Ballin near Venice, then drive three hours to Petra, stay the night, and get up at six in the morning and work with the next factory. Later, Anna brought her younger brother Massimo on board, and she would stay in the office, leaving it to Massimo to come with us and drive us around.
    I also wanted to keep our investor in the loop, so I brought my father along on one of these trips to Paoletti and then up to Ballin. To make it a full team effort, Jimmy and Sandra came, too, so it was the four of us checking into some little pension just below the factory and, of course, I’d booked four separate rooms. But then in front of everyone Jimmy said, “No, no, Sandra and I will share.”
    I looked at her and saw her face go white. “To save money,” Jimmy explained.
    At that point my dad still hadn’t caught on. He said, “Oh. Okay. Great!”
    Jimmy always wanted to share with Sandra, and when he didn’t get to, he would sit in the meetings at the factories and sulk and make rude, off-the-wall comments. His strange behavior was very obvious to the Italians and very embarrassing to the rest of us.
    Each season, our first conference with each of the suppliers would be based on Sandra’s sketches. By the time of the second meeting we saw every shoe in the collection, with Sandra marking the shoe with a silver pen, moving the strap a millimeter down or up to get the balance right. I was obsessed. I really wanted to make the perfect shoe.
    I would stand next to Francesco, our last maker, and say, “No, I want the toe flatter” or “Shave it down by a millimeter.” Then we’d go to the heel supplier and stand next to his machines. “No, thinner in the middle,” or “Wider,” or “More flared out at the base.” I had very clear ideas about what I wanted.
    Month by month, the DNA of Jimmy Choo was expressing itself more and more clearly. In terms of manufacturing, this meant only the best components and an obsessive attention to detail. In terms of design, it meant vintage ideas reconsidered, exotic fabrics and extras, and sex appeal that was also sophisticated, never cheap.
    So what makes a shoe sexy? It’s the balance of the foot, and where the straps are placed, and maybe being low cut at the front so you see toe cleavage. Then again, I’ve been told that the nerve endings for the genitals and the foot are adjacent in the brain, which is why a little cellmigration is capable of giving people all too great a passion for feet and for shoes. We tried to stop just short of that point.
    When we started out, the shoe industry offered plenty of opportunities to innovate on a purely practical level. Boots for women had always been too wide at the calf, for instance, and nobody had thought about improving that aspect of the fit. So I created a line of boots with the upper portion cut very tight. Say your foot was a size 39 or 40 (8.5–9). For boots that size we would use the same upper portion you’d find on