SOLE SISTER TO THE STARS
The A-list can’t get enough of LISA KAY’s shoe brand Sole Bliss. Claudia Joseph meets the woman with a knack for blending red-carpet style with serious comfort
Lisa Kay clearly remembers the moment she decided to create fashionable shoes for people with bunions. It was her husband Roger’s 50th birthday on 26 May 2011, and she was hosting a family dinner party at their €1.85 million house in Hertfordshire. Wearing four-inch court shoes with a Kooples dress, she felt in her element. But within hours, her feet were so painful she jettisoned her heels and donned espadrilles.
‘The heels were silver suede with an embellished heart on the front. But, that evening, they began to hurt my left foot and I ended up having to succumb to something more comfortable,’ she says. ‘I used to go to parties and dance all night long but suddenly I couldn’t do that any more.’
It was a lightbulb moment that would lead to her setting up the shoe brand Sole Bliss, now a favourite with royalty and Hollywood stars.
After that evening, Kay, 59, began to research bunions (hallux valgus), which occur when the first metatarsal bone in the foot shifts outwards, and the big toe moves inwards towards the second toe, causing a bulge on the side of the foot. She discovered that more than ten million women in the UK and Ireland suffer from the condition. ‘When I started researching how many women suffered like me, I couldn’t believe the numbers,’ she says. ‘I realised there was a big gap in the market.’
Even so, others took a while to be convinced. ‘I remember going out with friends to a local Italian restaurant, and they said, “Why would I buy shoes for bunions? I would prefer to wear sexy shoes.
Bunions aren’t sexy.” They just wanted to have an operation to get rid of them and wear normal shoes.’
Kay, who had been working in the fashion industry as a shoe and bag designer for more than 35 years, was undeterred. She already had four shoe shops in London and Hertfordshire. In a matter of months she had registered her brand and began testing her templates on customers.
‘When we had the shops, there was lots of opportunity to do market research,’ she says. ‘I had groups of women standing on foam to test it out. A friend of mine contacted Jo Good, the BBC Radio London presenter, who runs the Middle-Aged Minx blog, and said, “I have the best job in the world. I’m a bunion model.” She phoned me afterwards and said, “You’ve got to speak to Jo,” and she had me on her programme talking about my shoes.’
After five years of research and development, during which Kay worked with podiatrists and Italian artisans, she launched Sole Bliss in 2017, with four styles: two court shoes, the 2½in heel Carmen and 3½in heel Pandora, both €185, and slingback versions (since discontinued).
Each shoe has cutting-edge technology to contour around the bunions, as well as cushioned soles, different widths and deep toe boxes to support arches, accommodate wide feet and alleviate pressure on toes or bunions. They’re also designed to prevent pronation – the inward rolling of the feet.
Within a year, Sole Bliss had launched its €185 Ingrid shoe, a 2in block heel, a favourite of Camilla who owns 13 pairs and has recommended them to Mary Berry. ‘I remember an order came from Clarence House,’ says Kay. ‘You don’t forget that.’
The then Duchess of Cornwall wore the shoes at the 2018 Royal Cornwall Show and things snowballed. ‘It was before a factory trip in Italy and we were chilling at the hotel at the end of the day,’ says Kay. ‘I remember seeing the photo online. I was so excited that I spilled my drink. It has been very good for us. The fact Camilla was walking out and about in them gave us a seal of approval, especially as she was able to wear them all day.’
Since then, many a celebrity has worn
Sole Bliss shoes, with the €229 Remy platform sandal proving a big red-carpet hit: actress Julia Roberts (opposite) wore a gold pair to the LA opening of her film Ticket to Paradise last year; Olivia Colman donned them in silver for this year’s premiere of the BBC series Great Expectations (left); Countryfile presenter
Anita Rani and actress Viola Davis both wore them to this year’s Baftas, while Helen Mirren wore a pair for the opening night of this year’s Cannes Film Festival (opposite).
The company now has a turnover of
€11.5 million and sells more than 300 styles of heels, sandals, flats and trainers. ‘It all helps when people are genuinely happy with what they wear,’ says Kay. ‘We do get spikes when famous people are seen in our shoes. Julia Roberts wore them to the Oscars and the phones rang off the hook. After Gayle King wore a pair on the red carpet with Tom Cruise for the premiere of Mission: Impossible, she talked about them on social media, which was very nice of her, and it went mad. A lot of the Loose Women presenters wear them – Nadia Sawalha posted a video about them. An ITV stylist told me there’s a long walk from the make-up room to the studio, so they need to be able to strut around.
‘Court shoes are a strong trend this autumn, but historically they are low cut so you can’t wear them over bunions. We cut them higher so everyone can wear them.
It’s important to have sexy shoes in the collection. We have a court shoe that’s
95mm [3¾in]. They have closed toes this season but will be open for the summer.’
Kay has inherited her business acumen from her father Brian Somers, 86, who owned a business selling small leather goods. She grew up in Middlesex, with him, her mother Myrna, 83, and brother Antony, 56, who is an actor and trapeze artist – he was the ringmaster on Take That’s Circus tour and also has a sideline in soft toys.
Kay began her career as an accountant, but her heart wasn’t in it and she stopped when her son Ollie was born in 1990. A second son, Zak, followed in 1994. The move into fashion wasn’t an entirely new direction for Kay. She and her husband, whom she met in 1982 when she gate-crashed his 21st birthday party, had started a company while she was still at university, selling fluorescent PVC belts to shops in London’s Camden, Carnaby Street and Covent Garden. ‘It was punk fashion at the time,’ she says.
They got married in 1988 when she was 24 and, after the birth of their children, set up a company designing bags and shoes. ‘You do learn by your mistakes,’ she says. ‘We made hairpieces like scrunchies when they were fashionable, and they were OK, but then we did leather jewellery like earrings – disastrous!’
So how many pairs of Sole Bliss shoes does she have in her wardrobe? ‘I’ve no idea,’ she says. Whatever the number, she will be able to dance all night in them without having to switch to espadrilles.
THE SHOES ARE A HIT WITH CAMILLA WHO OWNS 13 PAIRS
Miriam Margolyes wants me to know she’s just sold out the London Palladium. And the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. And got ‘standing ovations at every single theatre’ on her nationwide book tour to promote Oh Miriam!, a second volume of scandalous, scatological autobiography detailing her life as an actress – a self-described short, fat, flatulent Jewish lesbian, a woman who will say anything to anyone, usually in words of four letters.
Now 82, Margolyes has been a familiar face and voice for decades, show-stealing in the Harry Potter movies and Blackadder,
voicing Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, winning a Bafta for her role in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. But the 2016 reality show The Real Marigold Hotel, in which a group of elderly celebrities toured India, showed us the true Miriam – out, proud, loud and unfiltered.
It led to a new kind of fame as a TV documentarian with the gift of empathy, and becoming a reliably outrageous fixture on This Morning and The Graham Norton Show,
bound to talk about sex or other bodily functions. Her reputation was cemented when she swore about Jeremy Hunt (‘f*ck you, you bastard’) on Radio 4’s Today
programme. Margolyes would prefer to be known primarily as a serious actress and a theatrical interpreter of Charles Dickens – ‘I wish I was regarded with awe rather than affection’ – but is clearly enjoying her late-onset celebrity. Her recent British Vogue
cover hangs on the wall between us. ‘I’m an egotist,’ she says happily.
When publishers courted her to pen her first autobiography, This Much is True, she readily agreed – although writing it was ‘agony, like an obituary you write yourself’. Why did she do it, then? ‘Money,’ she says bluntly. The advance was €290,000 and when the book sold well she was offered the same for a follow-up. Given we meet in the basement flat of her grand house near London’s Clapham Common, and that she also owns properties in Italy and Australia, what will she do with the extra cash?
‘Well, I’ll pay a lot of tax, which I do willingly as my father instructed me to,’ she says, ‘and I’ll save the rest for carers, which I’ll need.’ Margolyes has spinal stenosis, has had a knee replaced and a heart valve transplant. She admits she is lazy and greedy which makes her poor health worse, and says, ‘I haven’t quite processed being 82.’ Her partner of 54 years Heather Sutherland, an academic based in Amsterdam, also has health problems. And although Margolyes exudes a child-like glee and curiosity, she is pessimistic about her future and the world’s.
The only child of beloved Jewish parents, a Glaswegian doctor and a Liverpudlian landlady with roots in Poland and Belarus, she is ‘a child of a war, conceived in an air raid, as my mother told me. And I really do think we could be on the brink of a war now that could engulf everything. I feel old, frightened, occasionally in despair.’ She beams suddenly, ‘But the minute I step on the stage, I feel immensely powerful.’
In the book she rails against right-wing governments. She describes Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson as evil (partly, in Johnson’s case, because Brexit has prevented her and Sutherland living in their Italian house for more than 90 days of the year). ‘I don’t think the Tory party was always corrupt and incompetent. But it is now,’ she tells me. ‘And it’s very sad for people who are lifelong Tories. I don’t hate those people. I feel pity for them, actually. Where do they go? What do they do with their misplaced enthusiasms?’
Of US Republicans she says, ‘How can any grown-up human being, who can read and write, honestly think that Trump won the last election?’ Margolyes took out Australian citizenship in 2013 but calls Australia ‘the most racist country in the world’, its recent decision to deny Aboriginals a voice in parliament a ‘stinker’ that was engineered by ‘wicked people’.
The only subject she steers clear of is the current conflict in Gaza although, as a secular Jew, she has been a vocal critic of Israel in general and Benjamin Netanyahu in particular in the past. ‘I’ve learnt that it’s best to be quiet about it,’ she says. ‘To show my pain and my sadness for all the horrible deaths and betrayals, but otherwise say nothing.’ Margolyes fell out with her friend Maureen Lipman, who is pro-Israel, even before the current conflict. ‘To lose a friend is sad. Losing a child, losing a family member, losing a human being, a life,
‘I FEEL OLD, FRIGHTENED… IN DESPAIR. BUT THE MINUTE I STEP ON THE STAGE I FEEL POWERFUL’
that’s very much more important. So, I’m not going to fan the flames.’
The book and its 2021 predecessor also take unusually honest pot shots at colleagues she regards as unpleasant: Steve Martin was ‘horrid’ making Little Shop of Horrors, several future members of the Pythons and the Goodies were rude and patronising to her when they were in Cambridge Footlights together. Steve Buscemi and Martin Scorsese, meanwhile, are praised for their courtesy and kindness – though she won’t go to see Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower
Moon ‘because I can’t go four hours without going to the loo’. She is still friends with contemporaries from her bluestocking education at Oxford High School for girls and has 11,000 contacts in her phone.
If there is one lesson she wants us to take from the book, it’s that friendliness, openness and kindness are the cardinal virtues. She wishes people were kinder to J K Rowling, who’s been pilloried for her views on gender, but also kinder to the trans community. ‘Some of us have vaginas and some of us have penises and some be on the way there, and some be on the way back. Just enjoy it all and find what you want,’ she says. ‘I can’t forget the woman I met in Australia, Francine, who was 79 and had just had the chop and she was crying with happiness at having become who she wanted to be. How can you not glory in that?’
She also thinks public reaction to
Phillip Schofield’s affair with a younger colleague was ‘too quick, too venomous, too damaging. I think cancel culture is rubbish. People will probably want to cancel me, but they haven’t so far.’ What could she say that would get her cancelled? ‘F*ck off!’ she says. ‘Or the fat thing.’ In a world of body positivity, Margolyes insists on referring to herself and anyone similarly sized as ‘fat’.
She thinks gay men still face prejudice in showbusiness but regards her own lesbianism as a sort of superpower that enabled her creativity and stopped her being ‘mired in children and stuff’. ‘I love being gay,’ she says, ‘though I don’t do it much now.’ She came out in her late 20s, but in both books writes about performing oral sex with a lot of men beforehand. ‘That was just part of my developing sexuality,’ she beams, ‘and I was really good at it!
And when you know you’re really good at something you tend to flaunt it. At least, you do if you are Jewish.’
She and Sutherland, who avoids publicity, met in the late 60s and have been together ever since, bar one separation caused by an infidelity of which Margolyes is ashamed. In old age they may finally live together though not, as they’d hoped, in Italy. ‘Two lesbians together for 54 years is not to be sniffed at,’ she says. ‘I found the perfect person. She is better than I am in every way – as a human being, as a lesbian, as a writer, as a thinker.’
Margolyes is prouder of Sutherland’s latest historical tome, about trade in Southeast Asia, 1600-1906, than of her own two books. But she is already planning a third. ‘I’d like to write a children’s book. Even though,’ she adds confidingly, ‘I don’t really like children. I want to call it Queen of Farts…’