Hello! Tai Tai's absolutely favourite shoes are her Jimmy Choo's which she purchased at Selfridges in London or Joyce in Hong Kong.   Talk about extreme comfort!  We wear our Jimmy Choo's around the house so our feet are always comfortable.    But note the company is no longer owned by him.   He continues to do couture ( divine!)  from London.

Choo's Next Steps

Perfectionist:  Jimmy Choo

Jimmy Too Shoes

Jimmy Choo, shoe designer to the glitterati, claims that a pair of his stilettos can transform a woman. Will an OBE give the man known as 'a girl's best friend' even bigger ideas?

It is a baking hot afternoon and I have turned up to meet Jimmy Choo in a pair of sensible, white tennis shoes. On arrival, it occurs to me that this was a mistake.

For, while Choo is far too polite to comment directly on them, he does gently explain why I might have felt more comfortable in something else - such as a pair of sling-back stilettos.

"A good shoe can do incredible things," he says, looking down at his own, which are black and shaped like blunt diamonds. "For a woman, the right shoe can make everything different. It can make you walk better, feel better. It's about being sexy. It's about . . ." Choo pauses for a moment before suddenly alighting on his key word: "Femininity."

It is also all about Jimmy Choo (pronounced "chew"). For no shoe-maker holds such a firm grip on that most basic female instinct: desire. He taught us that a few inches of spindly stiletto can do more for a woman than yards of decolletage, and his popularity has long since entered fashion mythology. Some women visit his Mayfair shop for bespoke fittings, others fax him photocopies of their feet for transglobal orders.

An entire episode of Sex and the City was devoted to Sarah Jessica Parker's Choo obsession and 45 pairs of his stilettos were spotted at the last Oscars ceremony. Jemima Khan went to him for her wedding slippers, and he stocked the shoe rack of Diana, Princess of Wales.

He is described as "the darling of the jet set" in his corporate press release, and it is an idea that clearly tickles him. "I don't know about that," he says, giggling.

"But if film stars and pop stars come to me - well, then I am very proud. There is a saying that diamonds are a girl's best friend. But some people have said to me, 'Jimmy Choo is a girl's best friend.' That is very nice."

In fact, the "jet set" has never seen much of Choo. He is renowned for being hard-working and sometimes stays in his workshop until 6am. He is a self-professed perfectionist and once worked non-stop for three days and nights, sewing beads on to shoes for a Katharine Hamnett show.

Meeting him, it's easy to imagine. There is no glitz to him, and none of the oily charm that might befit the favourite of film actresses and "It" girls. Instead, he has the self-conscious, slightly nervous demeanour of someone unaccustomed to sitting easy. At 46 he is rake thin, and sits with the alert, ramrod deportment of a gymnast.

He is clearly unused to promoting himself and has to be prodded hard to explain the winning ingredient in his own shoes: "They're comfortable."

As I fight back my scepticism at the idea that a stiletto heel can ever be comfortable, I prod further. "They must be more than that?"

"They are comfortable. Very comfortable . . . And sexy." And that is all he has to say on the matter.

Choo's reticence is probably in part due to his faltering English, for which he keeps apologising. "It's very bad. Very bad, still." It's not very bad, but he does have a thick Malaysian accent which is at times hard to decipher. (And hard to account for, since he has lived in London since his early 20s, when he came to study at Cordwainer's College in the East End.)

We are accompanied by his company press officer, who clarifies things: "Jimmy never compromises on comfort." "Jimmy is proud of all his clients." "Japanese fashion students are crazy about Jimmy and his shoes."

Choo rarely gives interviews, but he has made an exception to The Telegraph to celebrate the OBE he was awarded last month. He has been described by friends as "an innocent", and one can see why.

He has Hollywood permanently buzzing on his fax-machine, yet it is with guileless, childish glee that he shows off his medal. "I was very honoured, very, very honoured," he says, pausing to gaze at it for several seconds in complete silence.

In fact, Choo is effortlessly Establishment. In his native Malaysia he already holds the title of Honorary Dato, equivalent to a British knighthood, and he says the OBE is equally important to him. "I care very much about both countries," he says. "In both countries I've worked very hard."

He has certainly worked hard for our Royal Family. The Duchess of York is a fan ("she likes sling-back stilettos"), and the Duchess of Kent is one of his longest-standing regulars. He has not shod the queen, but has firm ideas about what would suit her. "A low heel," he says. "Probably just about two inches."

Each pair of Jimmy Choo shoes is made to order in his Mayfair office - although there is a ready-to-wear label, Choo works only on couture - and entails negotiations with the client.

"I talk to all my customers," he says gravely. "That is very important because a shoe should reflect a person's character. It should complement it." Prices start at £450, with more complicated stilettos - those encrusted with crystals, for example - rising to about £850.

You could imagine his shoes lined up in a display case, along with the Fabergé eggs; yet he insists that the main appeal lies simply in their wearability.

"A shoe should not be difficult to wear. You do not need to suffer to be beautiful. It should feel like a part of you. And it can add to you. If you are walking on a four-inch heel you walk straighter. You don't slouch. You live up to it."

He has brought some examples with him, which would certainly take some living up to. As his press officer unfurls them from their tissue paper, they look like rare jewels - which, to his cliéntele, is presumably how they're seen. One is made of red satin and leather, with a gold toe-cap and a butterfly stuck on it.

"The red represents prosperity and luck," he says, turning it over in his hands with a near-trance-like expression. "If it's not perfect I will change it. A shoe is a work of art. It's like a painting - you can keep on revising it. Every night I will look at the shoes in my office and think, Well? Could they be improved?"

It is a philosophy he absorbed during his childhood in Malaysia, where his father had his own prosperous shoe-making business. Under his father's guidance, Choo tells me, he made his first pair at the age of 12.

"My father was not just making shoes," he says gravely, "he was creating something to do with his heart and his mind, and transferring it to the human feet. He told me that it was not just about making shoes and money. It was about being an artist. There is no point if it is not art."

Yet, for Choo, the financial rewards have been huge. This must have been hard to envisage when he started out in 1986, making two pairs a day from a studio in Hackney, east London. "In those days I slaved in the workroom all the time," he says. "I never went out and I never saw people."

His reputation soon spread. The fashion press lauded him, and Emma Thompson and Kylie Minogue placed their orders.

Then came Diana, Princess of Wales, who began patronising him in 1995 and to whom he attributes much of his success. "I was lucky that she supported me," he says. "After that I got a lot more interest from all over the world."

Choo and the Princess would regularly pour over designs at Kensington Palace (he calling her "Mum" instead of "Ma'am", because of his strong accent), though he cannot remember how many pairs he provided her with. "I lost count," he says. "Her favourites were flat pumps, but when she wore heels she never wore ankle straps: she wore sling-backs.

It was just after finishing his last pair of shoes for Diana that Choo learned of her death. "I had made her a pair of gold pumps which she ordered shortly before the accident," he says. "I was going to deliver them on Monday but the news came on Sunday. It was very sad. I have kept them in memory of her."

While the Princess helped make Choo a name, she did not make him a phenomenon. That he has become one is largely thanks to an encounter in 1996 with Tamara Yeardye, then a 27-year-old accessories editor at Vogue. She spotted the mass-market potential in his shoes, and persuaded him to expand into ready-to-wear.

As she explained: "Manolo Blahnik was the only competition. That was it. Jimmy was making two pairs of shoes a day, by hand, from a workshop in the East End. My idea was to take the company to a completely different level."

And she did. Suddenly, Choo's shoes were being sold everywhere, and references in fashionable conversation to one's "Jimmy Choos" began to outnumber those to "Manolos".

The first London store opened in 1996; by 1998 there were three stores in America and, soon enough, the company was valued at £35 million. Yet, Choo was a figurehead in name only.

He stuck rigidly to couture, entrusting the ready-to-wear designs to his niece, Sandra Choi. He sold his 50 per cent stake in the company two years ago to Equinox Luxury Holdings, the fashion division of Phoenix, the private fund management firm.

The reason given was that he wanted to concentrate exclusively on his couture line but, before the split, there were rumours of tensions between the ready-to-wear and couture divisions. When I raise the issue, Choo's press officer hurriedly clarifies the matter: "Jimmy Choo has always been about couture. He wanted to focus on what he likes best."

Does he mind his name being attached to a company over which he now has no influence? "No," he says diplomatically. "I respect them and I like what they do."

In fact, Choo says his main reason for selling was to spend more time with his family. He has a wife, Rebecca, who also trained at Cordwainer's and now works with him in the business, and a 12-year-old daughter, Emily, who he takes to and from school every day.

"I used to just work, but now I have found more time," he says. "I don't work on Sundays and I try to leave the office at 6pm. I like shoes, but I know now there are other things, like . . ." Choo pauses for a moment, then giggles quietly . . . "Like people!"

After we have been talking for an hour or so, the photographer turns up. Looking suddenly rather self-conscious, he suggests that he has his picture taken wearing his medal.   - by Emily Bearns    TELEGRAPH     8 July 2003

Who Is Jimmy Choo? 

Beneath the blaze of the carefully placed umbrella heaters, in the muted glow cast by a string of Chinese lanterns, a single cappuccino-colored ponytail whipped from side to side as Tamara Mellon, the 33-year-old president of Jimmy Choo shoes, planted her 26th double-cheek kiss.

There were now seemingly as many photographers as guests on the patio at the Buffalo Club in Santa Monica, Calif., and every time one of their number snapped the pink-cheeked hostess in her black-velvet ribboned breeches and corset-cleavaged Yves Saint Laurent blouse, Mellon tilted her head coquettishly over one shoulder, hitched a hip back in the Moll Flanders manner, shot a well-turned ankle toward the camera and positioned her perfectly pedicured foot just so.

Mellon was throwing this party to celebrate the opening of Jimmy Choo's sixth store in America. The London-based chain had just notched a space in one of the most profitable malls in the country, Costa Mesa's South Coast Plaza, a bus stop for Japanese tourists combing the California littoral for brand-label clothing like Jimmy Choo shoes, the most popular footwear at the Oscars.

For years, Manolo Blahnik, the other British shoe designer with a ponytail, stood taller than his colleagues, mainly because of his own unwavering affection for the stiletto heel, an engineering feat the diameter of a thumbtack and fetishized by men and women alike. Blahnik remains the visionary against whom all other high-end shoemakers are judged. But lately, Mellon, a former It Girl from Britain, has been drumming her way into the frontal lobes of those who would spend $450 on a pair of Manolos by pitching her just-as-expensive Jimmy Choos as ''a younger looking shoe.'' In the worldview she is selling, Manolos are for Mrs. X, the Mommy Dearest who guest-stars in the best-selling ''Nanny Diaries,'' a witch on heels who organizes her panties in Ziploc bags. Choos are for the boot-loving Sara Ludlow, the ''hottest girl'' in Nick McDonell's new book ''Twelve,'' a private-school purebred with a Nokia cellphone stuffed in her Prada bag. When George W. Bush was inaugurated, his 19-year-old twins, Barbara and Jenna, requested Jimmy Choo cashmere stiletto boots. Their dressmaker, Lela Rose, patiently explained that the girls didn't want to look like their mother.

It's a high-stepping public profile for a company founded just six years ago, one that was almost tripped up at the gate by an old-fashioned family feud. On one side stood Tamara Mellon (the Face) and Mellon's publicity-minded entrepreneur father, Tom Yeardye (the Money). On the other was the outwardly meek Malaysian shoemaker, Jimmy Choo (the Name), and his ambitious apprentice niece, Sandra Choi (the Talent). In the haze of accusations and remonstration among all these characters over who, exactly, should get the Credit, there lies the inevitable question: Who is the real Jimmy Choo? It's a long story.

The Making of the Money
Perhaps it's best to begin in the dyspeptic belly of the Queen Mary. It was 1949, and Tom Yeardye, a North Londoner who worked in the ship's engine room, realized that there was better food in the officers' mess because it came from the American side of the boat's Southampton-New York route. He had a sense that his future lay in America, but immigration laws blocked his escape. After his tour of duty ended, Yeardye found work in London's Pinewood Studios, where, he says, ''If you looked like Rock Hudson or Gregory Peck from a distance, they paid a lot of money.'' But mainly Yeardye worked as Victor Mature's body double.

Yeardye's name first made it into the newspapers when he broke up the marriage of Diana Dors. Known as the British Marilyn Monroe, Dors was the kind of woman who went grocery-shopping in marabou mules. After Dors moved on to her next conquest, Yeardye opened a restaurant in London called the Paint Box, where the diners could sketch nude models, and then a nightclub, Le Condor, where a young Engelbert Humperdinck (then called Gerry Dorsey) sang in a band. Yeardye was investing in real estate when he married Tamara's mother, Anne Davies, a model who was the face of Chanel No. 5.

One day, Davies came home from a job carrying a new product, hot curlers. Yeardye traveled to Denmark and bought the U.S. license from its isolated inventor. Carmen Curlers were a huge hit for Saks Fifth Avenue, and in 1966, Clairol bought Yeardye out for $1 million, making him a rich man. When a friend from his swinging London days named Vidal Sassoon announced that he was relocating to Beverly Hills and asked Yeardye to help him create a worldwide business, Yeardye finally made his move to America. His young family -- Tamara had arrived in 1969 -- bought a house on Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills, next door to Nancy Sinatra.

The Making of the Face
Little Tamara was enrolled at El Rodeo, but her mother switched her into a Catholic school because she was spending too much time on the phone with her friends chattering about Gucci belts. When Tamara later expressed interest in attending Beverly Hills High School, she was packed off to Heathfield, the sister school to Eton. Tamara left Heathfield at 16, typical for women who weren't on the university track, and enrolled at the same finishing school outside Gstaad that Princess Diana attended. She learned how to speak French, set a table and address people who have titles. ''What they were doing was preparing you to be a wife and come back and marry whomever and run the estate,'' she says evenly.

Tamara liked finishing school. But she was eager to work. ''At the end of the day, the person with the money is the person with the control,'' she says, like a person with money. There was a year-and-a-half stint as a shop assistant in the Alaia department at Brown's (where she spent more money than she made), a quick spin through fashion P.R. and a spot at Mirabella magazine calling in accessories. When Mirabella folded, she asked her father to revive it, but he declined. ''If Rupert Murdoch can't make money on it, I sure can't make money on it,'' he remembers saying.

Tamara consoled herself with a job at British Vogue. It was there that she first became acquainted with the work of Jimmy Choo.

A Good Name Is Hard to Find
In Malaysia, Jimmy Choo's father was a shoemaker, but Jimmy decided to refine his own skills at Cordwainers College in London in the early 1980's. His first label, Lucky Shoes, was sold out of a stall in a market on the South Bank, but by 1986, he'd set up his own custom business in a Dickensian former hospital in Hackney, where other bohemian craftsmen like Alexander McQueen were also in residence.

At that time in London, there was an unspoken rule that the shoes should always match the dress. Between the staid ribbon-cuttings and three-nights-a-week galas she was attending in her beaded pastel Catherine Walker gowns, Diana, Princess of Wales, found that she needed more attention to her feet than a reflexologist could offer. As a royal, she was obliged to use a British designer, and she stumbled across Choo, who was making shoes to match clothes for the British fashion magazines. Phobic about gossip, Diana found Jimmy quiet, unassuming and at some remove from her own social milieu.

Choo would visit Diana at Kensington Palace, and young Prince Harry would carry Choo's heavy suitcase full of samples back to the car. Now that he was cobbling for the most famous woman in the world, business started to bustle. Choo was also creating shoes for twice-yearly runway shows, and the workload was stupendous. He needed help. In 1989, he was joined at home and in the workshop by his niece, Sandra Choi.

The Hidden Talent
Sandra Choi's father -- Jimmy's brother-in-law -- owned a Chinese restaurant on the Isle of Wight in England. Shortly after Sandra was born, she was left with her grandparents in Hong Kong, where she grew into an Adidas-obsessed teenager who shaved the sides of her head and skipped school. There was makeup, there were Dr. Martens and there were boys. She had started to smoke and was ''experimenting with things,'' she says. Her grandparents dispatched her to the Isle of Wight at the age of 13, and she was promptly deposited in a convent school by her parents. At 17, she ran away to London, moving in with her Uncle Jimmy. She finished up high school on the East End, and then applied to Central Saint Martins, the famous art and design college attended by John Galliano and Stella McCartney; she'd read about it in Jimmy's fashion magazines.

Choi set out to study clothes -- not shoes -- but she also worked for Jimmy, booking appointments, handling magazine folk and cutting and stitching shoes on his production line. It was a taxing schedule, and after a year, she dropped out of school and went to work for her uncle full time.

The label was popular, but not well capitalized, and that meant business was not as good as it looked. ''To make shoes in England is not easy,'' Choi says. ''We are isolated from components. There are no beautiful heels. There are no beautiful lasts. There is no beautiful leather. It's all in Italy.'' So they would improvise, creating interesting toe shapes, she says, ''using the filler you'd use to fix your car.''

Money Talks (and the Talent Walks)
By this point, Mellon had quit Vogue and was casting around to start her own business. She approached the pair about starting a shoe label that would be sold in stores. ''Jimmy Choo was just a great name for shoes,'' Mellon remembers thinking.

Jimmy and his niece were astonished by her interest. ''We turned to Tamara and said to her, nicely, that maybe she should experience what it's like to work in the shoe industry,'' Choi says. For three months, Mellon reported for work in Levi's and a T-shirt and answered the phones upstairs. These were the days ''before Tamara was dressing in head-to-toe mink, you know, diamonds dripping,'' Choi adds.

''I remember thinking, Oh, God, a rich girl getting into the business,'' Choi continues. ''What happens if she doesn't do anything? She was like a little robin.'' Mellon was surprised by how messy and labor-intensive the work was, Choi says. But she remained interested and a deal was struck with Jimmy in May 1996. Tom Yeardye was induced to finance the entire operation himself at first. ''I spent a fortune buying shoes for Tamara and her mother,'' he recalls. ''I would say, 'We've got to get into this business one of these days,' in jocular fashion.''

A store was leased near Harvey Nichols. Choo flew his feng shui master in from Malaysia, who instructed him to make sure the cash register faced away from the door so all the money wouldn't wander out.

From the outset, there were problems. ''The original idea was for Jimmy to design the collection, and I would find the factories, produce the shoes in volume, open stores, sell the collection to wholesale clients and handle the P.R.,'' Mellon says. ''But we realized early on that there's a big difference between making a pair of shoes and designing a full collection. You have to predict trends. You have to sketch probably over 100 shoes.'

But Choo, who had a family to support, was continuing his couture business, as it provided a steady income. Although he had an equity stake in the ready-to-wear business, he wasn't drawing a salary. In any case, Choo was accustomed to making a single pair at a time for customers who mainly picked what they wanted from pre-existing samples. The thought of expanding his repertoire seemed to overwhelm him.

''He is a cobbler,'' Mellon says flatly.

Worried that the Yeardyes were going to sue the family if Choo failed to produce a full line, Choi hurtled into the void, sketching a collection of 30 shoes that at first contained only about six or seven stilettos. As it turned out, she was good at it. She had a surprising knack for creating the sort of original shoes that would appeal to the sort of women Mellon calls ''the opinion leaders.'' Mellon started making deals with Italian factories so they could increase the collection to a more marketable size. But Choi was showing the strain. After finishing up at the store, where she and Mellon handled all operations late into the night from the basement and sometimes waited on the customers themselves, Choi would head back to Hackney and work with her uncle on his custom shoes, occasionally until 3 in the morning. ''My life was tearing in half,'' she says.

From the outside, the operation seemed positively genteel. The shoes generated reams of press as the girls played official farrier to Hollywood, taking a suite at L'Ermitage to dress the Oscar bound and producing a million-dollar sandal strung with diamonds for Vogue. Choo became upset that all the articles were suddenly about Mellon, who was retailing her $1 million wedding at Blenheim Palace to an heir of the American Mellon fortune and who, by all appearances, was running the entire company. Choo also felt he deserved royalties from the sale of the storefront shoes.

Sandra Choi was chafing from the friction between the Yeardyes and her own baffled clan. ''Words were thrown within the family backward and forward,'' Choi says. In February 1997, Sandra Choi ''left Jimmy,'' she says with a great deal of meaning, and for a time moved in with Mellon, taking over an entire floor of her town house.

Around this time, Diana had procured a divorce and was therefore commanded to appear at fewer events in custom-colored shoes. She would show up at the girls' store on Saturday mornings, where she would park on the yellow line outside and complain about all the tickets she was getting.

Choi says her Uncle Jimmy grew jealous. They stopped talking entirely. ''He felt betrayed,'' Choi says.

The Name Wins Recognition, Then the Boot
In 2000, Jimmy Choo was named Accessory Designer of the Year by the British Fashion Council, an award based on the votes of 1,000 people in the fashion business. Mellon had lobbied strenuously to replace Choo on stage at the televised event. But Choo had hired his own publicist -- and lawyer -- at this point, and he prevailed with his argument that he already had a name in the business before Mellon was on the scene and that it is common for a fashion designer to employ design teams.

That is certainly true at big fashion houses, where designers often sign off on other people's work. But it's a different story at most high-end shoe houses, where people like Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin and Pierre Hardy design a shoe personally and their names appear on it.

''People didn't understand the difference between the custom business and what's in all our shops,'' Mellon says, exasperated. ''And anyway, it's not the name that makes the product but the product that makes the name.''

Both Mellon and Choo now badly wanted out of their relationship. Finally, in November 2001, Choo was bought out of the company for $10.6 million by Equinox Luxury Holdings, backed by Phoenix Equity Partners, a billion-dollar venture capital firm now bankrolling the company's expansion. Twenty-five more stores are slated to open in the next five years. Equinox, which took a 51 percent stake in the company, is run by Robert Bensoussan, 44, a former LVMH executive.

Bensoussan is now the C.E.O. of Jimmy Choo Ltd., and Tom Yeardye is chairman. On Bensoussan's desk sits a bead-encrusted scarlet pump commemorating the sale. Jimmy Choo was allowed to continue his small couture business and handed a licensing deal that comes up for review in 2004. Depending on the outcome of that, the possibility exists that Jimmy Choo could lose the right to use his own name.

The Face Takes Her Place
After the widely publicized sale to Equinox, many in the fashion business were still puzzling over who, exactly, was designing the shoes -- the ones now being talked about on ''The Sopranos'' and ''Sex and the City.''

Mellon's publicists have been known to tell people that the shoes are designed by her and not by Sandra Choi. They compare Mellon to Tom Ford at Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano at Christian Dior, because they know it can help the image of a design house if the designer interests people. Mellon has the looks and the society laurels, and she spookily embodies the demographic of this product. But does she design the shoes?

''It's quite funny to see the contrast between Tamara and me, isn't it?'' Sandra Choi is saying. ''I'm like a girly, just kind of like whatever, but she's oh so properly dressed up like a doll.''

Choi, 30, is sitting in the showroom surrounded by the entire spring-summer collection. As the company's creative director, Sandra Choi has a lot to say about what comes out of this workshop. When asked about the division of labor, Tamara Mellon describes it this way: ''She is the architect, and I am the interior designer. She sits down and sketches the structure of the shoe, the bones of it. And then I'll come in, and we'll say: Right. I think that shoe should be in red kid.''

When she has time, Mellon attends the important fabric shows in Italy and collaborates on the ornamentation. She also monitors the fashion collections so the pair will know when the hippie-cowboy look is riding the runways. Choi spends a lot of time making sure the factories are doing what they're supposed to. Mellon will notice there's a lot of yellow on the catwalks, for example, so she'll increase the yellow shoes in the stores.

Choi says it helps having Mellon there to rule on styles, because she sees her as the customer. A company mantra is that these are women designing for other women. (Traditionally, there have been more male designers in this business, in part because making shoes by hand requires arm strength to stretch a leather upper; Choi admits this is the one part of the process she can't master.) And so their open-toe shoes are stuffed with comfort in mind; there is extra padding where the ball of the foot rests. An informal Mr. Whipple-style test conducted on other brands in the fabled Neiman Marcus shoe department indicated that this padding was unique, though fans of the shoe say the pad flattens out in three days.

Choi used to tell reporters that the four-inch heel was only good for about four hours of wear. Mellon has now banned her from saying that. Still, Choi says, ''it's the truth.''

Choi is wearing the same style of Cartier watch Tamara used to wear before her husband gave her the $21,800 version with the diamond bezel as a birthday present. Both women like to wear a pointy stiletto from the fall collection known as Savage. But the two, who were thrown together by stressful circumstance, now lead increasingly independent lives. ''Otherwise, I don't think we'd be able to breathe,'' Choi says.

Jimmy Who?
As Mellon and Choi have grown bolder, making public statements that their only competition is Manolo Blahnik, they have earned the scorn of some in the fashion world for presuming to place themselves in the same league.

Blahnik, 60, is increasingly annoyed by the presence of this brand and its celebrity-chasing ways, admits George Malkemus, president of Manolo Blahnik U.S.A. According to a friend of Blahnik's, his grudge dates back to the days of the Hackney workshop, which he believes occasionally copied elements of his shoes for the magazines. Blahnik and others in the industry think they see echoes of ancient Manolos in some of the girls' shoes. ''In the footwear industry, everybody and their cousin makes the claim that they've been copied,'' says Michael Atmore, the editorial director of Footwear News. ''This is an industry full of knock-offs and slight variations of ideas, and it is impossible to trace who actually had the idea first.'' The topography of a shoe is so limited that there are only a few points of distinction -- heel height and shape being one of them. Shoe designers are especially protective of those elements. Blahnik has lined his London store window with a fine layer of chicken wire to thwart the cameras of would-be copycats.

When charges that Choo had co-opted some of Blahnik's designs came up in a conversation, Mellon groaned and discussed what she feels is a hurtful whisper campaign orchestrated by Blahnik and his employees. ''I think it is quite insulting because we very much do our own thing,'' she said indignantly. ''Our styles are very different.'' There's also the argument that the big-city sophisticates who buy these shoes are familiar with both lines and would never tolerate copies. Sandra Choi says she sometimes looks at Blahnik's shoes specifically so she won't be accused of ripping him off. She says her heel shapes are ''slicker'' and ''Mr. Blahnik's are curly whirly.'' Asked to explain the latter, she references a British industry description for a heel with a slightly flared base: ''You know, toilet shaped.''

A factory owner outside of Florence who handles half of Jimmy Choo's production says that a Manolo Blahnik representative recently called to ask if he could make shoes for Blahnik. (Over the last decade, Blahnik has expanded his production, releasing a more commercial line of reissued classics in the states.) Mellon says: ''If I called his factory, he would flip out. It's a confidentiality issue. You don't want people knowing anything about your business.'' The majors rarely share factories. Mellon says she believes Blahnik was ''trying to push us out.'' (Malkemus denies the factory was contacted.)

Some have suggested that Neiman Marcus has been pressured not to carry Jimmy Choos by Blahnik, who does big business there. In New York, Manolos are carried alongside Choos at Bergdorf Goodman, and this does rankle Blahnik, Malkemus says.

Blahnik has many fans in the business. Michael Atmore says that ''there's a level of refinement in his shoes that does set Manolo Blahnik apart.'' Some in the shoe trade think that there's more talk from the Jimmy Choo side about Manolo Blahnik than vice versa and that Jimmy Choo is actually trading on this pairing. Or as Malkemus puts it: ''When you're selling a copy at $49, that's one thing. But when you're selling lesser workmanship at the same price, it's so irritating. This is 30 years of Manolo's blood, sweat and tears.''   -  Phoebe Eaton  New York Times Magazine     1 December 2002

Feng Shoe 

Jimmy Choo has decided it’s time to give footwear deeper meaning. The London-based shoe designer, whose delicate mules hoof some of fashion’s highest, has applied the principles of feng shui to his latest collection, known as Healing Soles, in a bid to guide lost souls and lift dampened spirits via the feet. “It works by incorporating crystals into the shoe,” he tells reporters. “Its colour depends on your special needs. If you need love, it is a pink crystal, if you need calm, it is blue.” And Jemima Khan has already bought into it. Choo has long been a believer in the benefits of feng shui. “I believe 100 per cent,” he tells this month’s Feng Shui magazine. “I believe it has taught me a lot of good luck. I have achieved fame and carved out a name for myself. I have even won many awards. This year I was made a dato (equivalent to a knighthood in Britain) by the Sultan of Penang, in Malaysia. I feel very blessed.” Now he plans to share his successes by opening a cobblers college, which will no doubt be feng-shuied to the hilt - and just as serenely successful as his Connaught Street workshop. Of his newest project, Jimmy goes on mystically: “You no longer have to be at home to have good karma. Now you can bring it with you at all times.” Pure genius.      Vogue On-Line   12 September 2000

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