My work always has to start with a feeling,” says Sandra Choi, sounding both insistent and inspired. As creative director at Jimmy Choo, where Choi has worked for 30 years, her role has evolved beyond simply making the label’s famous shoes. But that’s where she started, and it’s what seems to excite her most. When she’s working with her team, she will attempt to convey that feeling – “cosiness”, perhaps, or “a sense of sparkle” – and they might come back with a material, an embroidery, a trim or a detail. “If we translate that and turn it into a piece,” Choi says, “that’s worthwhile.”
There’s more to it than just feelings, of course. A typical day involves “constant decision-making” – on product details, campaign visuals and collections, often working months in advance. If this sounds complicated, then Choi, talking to me in the sitting room of the Battersea house where she lives with her husband and two children, seems resolutely cool. You can sense from the way Choi speaks – considered, articulate – the qualities that make her an effective creative director. And three decades in, she’s as passionate about her product as ever. There are shoes everywhere, in fact. On the stairs, in the hallway, by the kitchen island. There are even more in storage and at her office in Victoria, she admits as she slips into a pair of red leather lace-up ankle boots for our photo shoot.
Choi, now 53, was born on the Isle of Wight and moved to Hong Kong when she was a child. She returned to the UK in her teenage years and later studied fashion at Central Saint Martins, where her tutor told her she had an aptitude for the more technical field of product design. But Choi insisted on sticking to what she saw as the course’s more alluring and creative pure fashion components. By this time, she had also started working at Jimmy Choo’s still-small workshop in east London. Choo had married Choi’s maternal aunt and was making a name for himself designing bespoke shoes. Choi’s time at the atelier was as educational as any degree – meeting clients (Princess Diana was the most famous), answering the phone to journalists and, eventually, crafting shoes. In 1996, Tamara Mellon – then a Vogue accessories editor with entrepreneurial instincts, and her father’s backing – joined the team, helping to usher Jimmy Choo from a made-to-order shoemaker into a ready-to-wear brand. That’s when Choi decided to come on board full-time. “I gave up school,” she says, though her tutor’s advice proved prescient. “Shoes are an object and fashion is a certain kind of expression, so the two [fashion and product design] really matched together.”
Jimmy Choo has since become a global luxury house synonymous with sexy, sophisticated stilettos, burnishing its reputation with accessory lines of bags, eyewear and fragrance for both men and women. Inspiration, for Choi at least, has stayed relatively consistent. “London gives you everything,” she says. When she was starting out, Choi was intrigued by how the “rawness” of Hackney and Dalston clashed with the brand’s “refined” clientele. She also thought a lot about what women wanted to wear, whether they were heading to work or play (or, indeed, both). “I wanted to wear heels during the day, so the kitten heel was a great thing,” she explains. And, of course, there was colour.
Against a sea of black and beige, Jimmy Choo went all in on pinks, yellows and animal prints. “I almost treated the shoes as jewellery,” she says. It was a bold approach, and the designs became hugely popular on the red carpet – from Hollywood to state affairs. A profusion of A-listers have worn Choo shoes over the label’s lifetime – Choi recalls a few, including Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett (the latter was responsible for the brand’s Oscars debut in 1999). Michelle Obama is a well-documented fan. In 2017, Kendall Jenner wore a pair of gold metallic sandals with translucent socks at Cannes. “Quite daring,” Choi remarks approvingly. More recently, London’s current crop of music icons – Charli xcx, Dua Lipa, Olivia Dean – have proudly sported Choos onstage. But it’s a fictional character that arguably cemented Jimmy Choo’s status: Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. In one now iconic episode, Bradshaw misplaces her shoes after a night out and screams, “I lost my Choo!” – a line not even the most optimistic strategic marketer could have dreamt up.
Last year, the label worked closely with London-based American designer Conner Ives and fashion critic Alexander Fury to select and reissue eight shoes in anticipation of the 30th anniversary. The drop included a python-print knee-high boot and, of course, Carrie’s lost slipper, a suede slingback sandal with a delicate feather – a move that speaks to the label’s playful streak.
But Choi – who this year was awarded an OBE for services to fashion, and will receive a Special Recognition Award at The Fashion Awards this November for her lasting contribution to strengthening the industry’s future – is looking ahead too. She talks of maintaining ambitious design standards and welcomes our renewed interest in looking smarter: “People want to get dressed properly again!”
When I ask Choi to pick her highlights from the company’s history, she mentions some notable business milestones, from the first London stores to subsequent global openings. Then she lands on a more everyday phenomenon: spotting a pair of the brand’s shoes in the wild, on a city street or in an airport queue. “There have been so many challenges,” Choi says. “But the incredible part is when I bump into people wearing Jimmy Choos – I still get a bit excited.”
