Burglars show Tamara a clean pair of heels ...with £800,000 worth of her Jimmy Choos
WHEN Carrie Bradshaw lost a heel while running for a ferry on Sex And The City, she famously wailed: ‘I lost my Choo!’
Now the designer brand’s co-founder, Tamara Mellon, has revealed she lost a lot more than that when thieves targeted her Los Angeles storage unit and stole £800,000 worth of designer footwear. The haul was her personal ‘archive’ of shoes, which she had collected in 16 years of working for Jimmy Choo, the company she founded with the eponymous Malaysian designer – including pairs seen on screen and at red carpet events, such as the Oscars.
‘It was their lucky day,’ she said. ‘It was my Jimmy Choo archive which was worth $1million in really valuable things from my 16 years.’
The unusual theft was first reported by the Los Angeles Police Department in July last year, however, it was unknown that the shoes
‘It was their lucky day... they got my archive of valuable things’
belonged to the 56-year-old British fashion tycoon until now.
Four suspects were later arrested after the stolen goods were offered for sale online.
Ms Mellon told the Page Six celebrity website she had now managed to recover 85 per cent of the stolen footwear, and thanked the detectives who reunited her with her treasured shoes.
She added that she has plans to officially show off her collection to the public, saying her intention is ‘to have a retrospective one day at a museum. There are so many pairs of shoes in there, so many special moments.’
Ms Mellon and Mr Choo founded the shoe brand in 1996, but she resigned from the company in 2011 after a series of public spats with its owners to set up a label in her own name. The London-born designer once said she owned more than 1,000 pairs of shoes and previously had the master suite at her £15million New York home expanded so it could accommodate some of the collection.