In My Shoes: A Memoir by Tamara Mellon, William Patrick Read Free Book Online

were people like Kay Montano, who was later to become the fashion industry’s über makeup artist, the singer Neneh Cherry, Gavin Rossdale of the rock band Bush, and Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul, who were breaking through at the time. I loved what these club kids were wearing, which was a very rough, street-chic, gangster look, which stylist Ray Petri began to market as Buffalo. He was the guiding force, style-wise, along with the model Nick Kamen. The idea was to create a smart and functional look that was nonfashion with a hard attitude. It paid tribute to rude boys, mods, blacks, punk whites, East Indians, ragamuffin Jamaicans, New Romantics à la Boy George, and bruised boxers. This was fashion up from the streets and from outside the fashion industry, which then infiltrated pretty much everything, from ad campaigns to magazines like
The Face
,
i-D
, and
Arena
. Buffalo made Petri a “fashion stylist” long before it became a coveted job description.
    I loved the music that was emerging at the time, which included rap. Acid house music also became popular after it was essentially launched in a dungeon-like basement in the East End called Shoom. There were fog machines and strobe lights and the fashion was to wear Pumas and aviators. The music pulsed and people danced and blew whistles as if they were leading a procession at the Carnival in Rio. The smiley face was the symbol for this whole scene.
    One night I met a guy called Barnzley who was from a council estate in Manchester or Leeds—somewhere up north. His real name was Simon Armitage, and he was friends with Nellee Hooper, and with all ofhis working-class grit he was definitely a go-getter, very trendy and cool, and we started dating. One day Barnzley said, “Let’s set up a stall in the market on Portobello Road,” and I agreed, so we began to make T-shirts with the yellow smiley face. I also began to sell my old clothes, along with things I’d pick up in thrift shops. It was fun, and I made a few pounds, but I was also just desperate for something to do, desperate for some way to break away from my parents.
    An unintended consequence of the stall was that it stirred up a latent interest in fashion, and soon thereafter I started taking classes at the American University in London, which included courses in pattern cutting and other aspects of design.
    My father thought that selling by hand was the way to learn retail, and he noted with approval that the entrepreneurial gene may have been passed on to me. He and I began to bat the ball back and forth, talking about business whenever we were together, and soon enough he encouraged me to move on.
    “If you get a real job,” he said, “I’ll match what you earn.”
    A few days later we were walking down South Molton Street together and we bumped into Sidney Burstein, a friend of my father’s from his days at Vidal Sassoon.
    Sidney looked at the wastrel daughter and said, “What are you doing now?”
    My father said, “She’s studying fashion. Taking courses at American University.”
    Sidney said, “That’s nonsense. You should come and work for me.”
    Sidney and his wife, Joan, owned Brown’s, the legendary boutique that had been introducing the great designers to London since 1970.Within the week I was selling Azzedine Alaia at their shop at 24 South Molton Street. I was much younger than the other girls, still a bit of a club kid, and occasionally I would show up wearing bike shorts, but of course made by Alaia. I also established the pattern of working all day, then staying up pretty much all night clubbing with Davina McCall and Samantha Robinson. Unfortunately, I also established a pattern of heavy dependence on the era’s drugs of choice: cocaine and Ecstasy.
    I was at Brown’s through most of 1987, and it was a great education in retail. I worked the stockroom as well as the floor, I set up displays, and I manned the cash register. Of course, I also loved the clothes, and by the time I