One of the cheapest shoes Jimmy Choo ever produced was a high-heeled flip-flop made from terry cloth in the summer of 2003. You may not have been able to walk in them, but, at £185, they were a snip compared with some of the brand’s skyscraper styles, shoes hoovered up at £500 a go by women who couldn’t work out if they were more obsessed with the brand’s snakeskin and satin confections or the sex and social life of Tamara Mellon, the company’s glamorous president.

Mellon founded the company Choo in 1996 after dragging Jimmy Choo, a Malaysian cobbler, out of East End obscurity and into business. By working her celebrity contacts (an early coup was muscling in on red-carpet events, lending shoes to stars), Mellon created a revolutionary luxury business model. She did for shoes what Tom Ford and Ralph Lauren had done for clothes; by trading on a lifestyle — her own — she turned a £150,000 loan from her father Tom Yeardye, the Vidal Sassoon entrepreneur, into a multi-­million-pound concern. The towelling flip-flops, she said, in a statement that encapsulated the Babylonian excesses of the time, were inspired by “the fantasy of my lifestyle — the helicopters, the holiday, the cars my husband owns, the fantasy fairy-tale elements of my life”.

The non-fantasy fairy-tale elements of Mellon’s rise have often been glossed over in the press. There have been hints at the unpleasant rift with Choo that has left him pretty much back at square one, even though his name adorns hundreds of stores worldwide. Then there’s the squabble over shares which means Mellon hasn’t spoken to her mother, Ann, since 2004, plus the relationship breakdown with Robert Bensoussan, the company’s former CEO. She has also had a string of disastrous but conveniently high-profile affairs: not least her marriage to the handsome but flawed banking scion Matthew Mellon.

But the finer points of Tamara’s manipulations do not escape the authors of this book, Lauren Goldstein Crowe, a former fashion business journalist for Time, and Sagra Maceira de Rosen, an investor in the luxury sector. When Matthew was arrested four years ago for tapping his wife’s computer, they wryly note that Tamara, by then a minor celebrity, appeared “as a witness for the prosecution…wearing a Roland Mouret pencil skirt and Jimmy Choo heels. The paparazzi had been given the fashion credits”.

Although the authors have missed the big scoop (co-operation from Tamara), they have drawn on several close sources, including her mother, who talked freely for 20 hours, and Lyndon Lea, owner of Lion Capital, who provides detail on the two years he spent investing in Jimmy Choo in the run-up to its sale for £185m in 2007. Combining the breathless pace of a Jeffrey Archer novel with a more serious appraisal of the ­luxury-goods industry, their book is well researched and crisply presented.

There are a few surprising sloppy errors (claiming Kate Winslet won an Oscar for Titanic, for example), while the turgid analyses of share deals leave the reader gasping for more Mellon froth, such as Tamara’s schooldays in Beverly Hills, when she would call her friends every morning to find out what they were wearing, or the brilliant article that appeared in the press on the rigorous regime involved in “keeping up with the top ring of the New York social set” — an exhausting whirl of matching pashminas, daily grooming appointments and his-and-hers Botox sessions for Tamara and her husband, an image-conscious recovering drug addict who once gave his wife “a white leather dress from Joseph to match the interior of his new Maserati”. And the description of the scramble to get Cate Blanchett a pair of shoes for the 1999 Oscars is fabulous: Mellon had come up with “the ultimate PR stunt”, a £67,000 pair of diamond Jimmy Choos that Blanchett would wear on the red carpet, only to discover they were too small. Despite fevered adjustments and “acres of press, the shoes stayed home from the ball. Craig Drake [the jeweller] was convinced that Cate did not wear them because they were getting more press than she was”.

Beyond these snapshots, though, Mellon is little more than a cardboard cut-out. Her appearance on the cover of Newsweek in 2006 is portrayed as ridiculous in the face of Bensoussan’s masterminding of the brand, which, overall, seems a bit mean. And a bit off-message, too.Mellon possesses ruthless grit and a tireless business acumen — she is almost Madonna-like in her quest for publicity, as well as the perfect body. Just as Blanchett sidelined the shoes, the authors of this book seem, curiously, to dismiss Mellon.

The Towering World of Jimmy Choo by Lauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira de Rosen
Bloomsbury £18.99 pp228

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