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

Pickering, I got the job. Sarajane had a well-deserved reputation for amazing photo shoots and always worked with the best photographers. Herb Ritts, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Limbergh—these were her main collaborators. To give the fashions the right look, we would go to incredible lengths, setting up on a mountaintop in Nepal one season and on the beaches of Malibu the next.
    On the downside, working this new job had many aspects of
The Devil Wears Prada
—with Sarajane in the Meryl Streep role—only with tunnel vision, night blindness, and a speech impediment added to her characterization of the “Devil.” Sarajane’s mother had suffered measleswhen she was pregnant, which left her daughter always sounding like she had a mouthful of cotton. But this did not mean that she wasn’t capable of screaming at me at high decibels from dawn to dusk. Then I’d go home to be yelled at by my mother. It was not a happy time.
    I remember once, trekking up the side of a mountain in the Himalayas with Sarajane, Sherpas bringing up the rear with trunk after trunk of clothing and cameras and lighting equipment, and my boss going on about her boyfriend problems the entire time, all the way up and all the way down, for a solid seven hours. I was ready to shove her off a cliff. But we actually became friends, and she was instrumental in inculcating my attention to detail.
    Once we were on a shoot in Central Park, and I’d run out of pins to gather in the dresses. Sarajane threw a red-faced screaming hissy fit every bit as good as anything my mother could have managed. I said I’d run back to the truck for more, but that wasn’t good enough. She continued to berate me, and then with Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista standing by like statues, she screamed, “You better run, Tamara! RUN!” I got to the point where I had everything provided in triplicate, sitting out, well ordered, and ready to go before she could even think about screaming. Years later after I’d started Jimmy Choo we ran into each other in New York. We got on very well, and she apologized for her behavior back when I worked for her.
    Working at
Vogue
was a long way from hanging out with the club kids at Crazy Larry’s, but biochemically it was very much the same. During the day I was focused on building a career, trying to get somewhere in a glamorous and highly competitive field. At night it was allabout self-medication for anxiety and depression, with verbal abuse as the constant drumbeat. To make matters worse, I was still living at home and under my mother’s thumb and hating myself for doing it.
    In prison they talk about EDR—the earliest date of release. For me there was no certain release date. I was going to have to earn my freedom from my family, and from the uncertainties of working for someone else. Having grown up subject to relentless, emotional manipulation, I didn’t want anyone ever to have control over me, so marrying well was never an appealing option. A husband’s wealth might provide you luxury, but at best that would be a gilded cage. I knew it was going to be up to me to attain the life I wanted to have.
    And after all those years of being told that I was useless, a dunce, and a thoroughly worthless human being, I had a desperate need to express myself. That’s when the penny dropped: Jimmy Choo. I’d done my time in retail, in public relations, and in the fashion press. I had a father to advise me who’d succeeded in a similar business. I was also the customer I wanted to reach. I lived the life our prospective client lived. I had an emotional connection to her tastes and dreams because I shared her tastes and dreams.
    In September 1996, less than a year after I went into rehab,
Tatler

ran the first story on me as an entrepreneur. Written by Vassi Chamberlain, it was all about the launch of Jimmy Choo and our plans for building a global brand. It even featured a picture of Jimmy and me. The hellion of Tramp