It is hard to remember now, but there was a time, before Sex and the City was the merest diamante twinkle in a television executive's eye, when most women did not think it reasonable to spend £500 on a pair of designer heels. Then, suddenly, for a while before our credit cards were comprehensively crunched, it seemed as though we were saturated by consumerism. It was not so much conspicuous consumption as consumption that wore a floor-length mink coat lined with diamonds and shouted: "Look at me! Look at me!"
The rise of the Jimmy Choo shoe empire coincided almost exactly with the boom in the luxury goods market through the late 1990s. Today, the company, which started out with a staff of one working from an insalubrious workshop in Hackney, east London, is valued at £200m and has shops all over the world. The shoes, which regularly adorn the manicured feet of Cate Blanchett, Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama, have proved so popular that not even global terrorism could dint the company's profit margins: in the week after the World Trade Centre attacks, sales in their US stores increased by 30-40% .
"No one knew why," write Lauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira de Rosen in The Towering World of Jimmy Choo (and try saying that after a few magnums of Cristal). "When faced with a life-and-death situation, could it be that people went shopping?" It is an interesting point. Sadly, it is one that the authors singularly fail to tackle. "Philosophical questions aside," they continue breezily, "the fact remained that the world was an uncertain place." Well, yes, that's certainly true. But what drives consumers to spend large sums of money on fripperies in times of crisis? And what has caused the exponential growth of the luxury goods market? Again, this book provides no answers.
Instead, the authors choose to concentrate on the straightforward narrative behind the business success of Jimmy Choo Ltd. Their work is impeccably researched and recounted in lively prose, but, after a while, there is only so much you can read about valuation multiples and price-to-sale ratios without wanting to skewer yourself in the heart with a crocodile-skin stiletto.
Anything mildly dramatic - the 2004 sale of Jimmy Choo to a private equity firm for £101m, for instance - is weighed down by extraneous detail. So it is that we learn in intimate detail about the promotional DVD that Rothschild Bank sent out to potential buyers in the run-up to the final deal: "[It contained] high-octane music and legs everywhere."
The juiciest bits are not those that deal with the business but that concentrate on the characters behind it, most notably Tamara Mellon, one-time socialite and Vogue accessories editor, who is often credited with making the brand into a global success.
Jimmy Choo was a Malaysian shoemaker working from a rented space in Hackney making one-off designs for a well-heeled clientele including Diana, Princess of Wales, when Mellon spotted his business potential. The book recounts how she co-founded Jimmy Choo Ltd in 1996 with £150,000 from her obliging father, Tom Yeardye, a former nightclub owner and one-time fiance of Diana Dors. She is reported to have pocketed £5m from the sale of Jimmy Choo five years ago and is ranked the 64th richest female in Britain.
Although they never explicitly say so, one gets the impression that the authors do not have much time for Mellon. While they credit her with a talent for publicity - it was Mellon's idea to set up a hotel suite at the Academy Awards where stars could get their Jimmy Choos dyed to match their dress - there are also a number of sniffy asides about her casual attitude to office hours, her liking for Botox injections and reflexology sessions. They report gleefully that she packed 10 pairs of shoes for a 10-day trip to the Bahamas: "Why so few?" they ask snidely. "Well, she was on a boat most of the time, she explained to her assistant."
They refer to her as "Celebrity Tamara" and imply that much of her supposed business acumen is simply down to knowing the right sort of people at the right sort of time. In a damning aside, they claim that she once described her role to a would-be buyer as "leading the design process. I decide if this season people are feeling in a hippie chic or in a sexy, glamorous mood".
Unsurprisingly, Mellon did not co-operate with the writing of this book. It is probably just as well: without the occasional kitten-heeled jab in her direction, The Towering World of Jimmy Choo would make for fairly dull reading. It is a book with a split identity - half fashion magazine, half business manual. It tries to be the literary equivalent of a sharp-witted stiletto but, in the end, it is simply too plodding and flat-footed to carry it off.
