BOOK OF THE DAY: The Towering World of Jimmy ChooBy Lauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira de Rosen Bloomsbury, 228pp, £18.99
IF TAMARA Mellon weren’t a real person, Jackie Collins would have had to invent her.
The beautiful daughter of a London entrepreneur, she grew up in Berkshire and Beverly Hills, attended a Swiss finishing school, and worked as a fashion buyer and Vogue assistant before joining forces with a little-known couture cobbler from Malaysia called Jimmy Choo in 1996.
At the time, Choo was making one-off pairs of shoes for fashion shoots and individual clients out of a rundown studio in Hackney. Five years later, the company bearing his name was one of the most profitable luxury brands in the world. It is now valued at more than £185 million (€219 million).
Lauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira de Rosen’s book tells the story of the brand and the people behind it. Mellon did not co-operate with the writers, but her estranged mother did.
Choo, who left the label after friction with Mellon and her family, initially provided the skills, but it was Mellon who provided the drive, the contacts and, with Choo’s niece Sandra Choi, the creative vision.
The Towering World of Jimmy Choo is most entertaining when the authors write about Mellon’s over-the-top persona. But much of the book falls flat, largely due to the authors’ refusal to move outside the confines of a straightforward narrative.
They inform us that the luxury goods industry expanded rapidly in the late 1990s and early 21st century and recount, in tedious detail, the many deals between luxury conglomerates that ensued. But beyond a reference to Sex and the City’s introduction of such labels to a wider audience, there is no attempt to explore why the luxury boom took place.
Nor do they attempt to analyse the appeal of luxury brands in general or of Jimmy Choo in particular. In just a few years, Jimmy Choo achieved a status usually enjoyed by brands established in the 19th and early 20th centuries but, although the authors point this out, they do not bother asking why.
The explanations of business jargon show the book is aimed at a general audience, which makes the authors’ decision to devote almost a quarter of the book to the minutiae of luxury industry mergers mystifying. Goldstein Crowe and Maceira de Rosen seem determined to make things as plodding as possible.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist