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THE SHAPE OF WISDOM

Text by Caroline Issa
Photography by Sara Zanoni
Set design by Martina Verità

Jimmy Choo’s new Pearl Capsule has the force of a manifesto: 30 years on, one of the original high heel powerhouses takes stock of its past, its future and the women who have shaped both. The collection turns the pearl – a trope of feminine decorum and discipline – into something subversive, intimate and alive.

In the 1990s, the brand reimagined the constraints of the stiletto as a weapon. One of the first blockbuster shoe brands, Jimmy Choo helped codify the heel as an aspirational object, as collectable and storied as a gentleman’s watch. All this was long before “it-shoes” and “drop culture” had become ubiquitous.

Sandra Choi has stood at the centre of that story for three decades, designing for the house since its inception in 1996 and becoming sole creative director in 2013. Her tenure is unique in an industry that cycles through creative leadership at speed, revealing a sustained conversation between designer, brand and its wearers.

To think of Jimmy Choo purely as the “killer heel” brand is to miss the subtler shifts under Choi’s watch. The original red-carpet mythology – those TV heroines sprinting through New York in satin pumps – has expanded into both more categories as well as a broader cultural presence, embedded in film, art and pop culture. In recent years, the house has begun commissioning and hosting contemporary artworks: from Symmetrical Repeats (2024), a vivid red steel sculpture by Emirati artist Shaikha Al Mazrou that now lives in the Dubai Mall flagship, to site‑specific installations and Miami Art Week projects created with Crosby Studios’ Harry Nuriev, which turn boutiques into spatial installations. These commissions, shown in galleries and installed in stores, position Jimmy Choo more widely as a patron of visual culture, inviting clients to encounter sculpture and immersive art alongside the glamour the brand creates within its products.

“Glamour is a spirit: it’s always something you can feel,” Choi insists, noting that someone in the plainest t-shirt can still “exude glamour” if the charisma is right. For her, glamour is “joyous and uplifting, with doses of playfulness and surprise” – a matter of mood, a shared wink. That shift, from surface to sensation, is central to the new Pearl Capsule.

Pearls are the traditional symbol for a 30th anniversary, but they also have a far longer, more tangled history than the gift guides would suggest. In ancient Greece, they were linked to Aphrodite and the sea, imagined as the crystallised tears of gods; in imperial China, they signified wisdom and status, stitched into dragon robes and reserved for those closest to power. In the European Renaissance, they became a visual shorthand for chastity and authority, shimmering across portraits of queens and duchesses. In the modern era, ropes of cream and white pearls have signalled everything from First Lady polish to avant-garde subversion, and have made a ubiquitous appearance on young men’s necks as the new dog tag. What makes pearls singular is that they require no cutting or polishing: they emerge from the shell already “finished”, which is why so many cultures have tied them to truth and integrity, embodying an unalterable beauty that swings from demure to decadent.

Choi leans into that ambiguity. “For this collection, I wanted to do something more natural, going back to the origin of a pearl,” she explains. “If you’re lucky enough to find them in nature, they come in all shapes and sizes, just like people.” Their irregularity becomes a metaphor for the women who wear Jimmy Choo – multifaceted and resistant to smoothing out their edges. It’s a clever inversion of the old, disciplined string of pearls: here, character is the point.

Jimmy Choo helped codify the heel as an aspirational object, as collectable and storied as a gentleman’s watch

The brand encoded pearlescence into its world long before this anniversary: its signature pink-grey packaging shade is literally named “oyster”. Over the decades, pearls have appeared in many guises – inlaid into heels, strung as anklets, scattered as studs. They have become a kind of modern code of Jimmy Choo, quieter than the brand’s sparkling crystals but no less potent.

In the Pearl Capsule, that code is distilled. Every piece, Choi insists, has to be “functional as well as an object of beauty”, and the studio wears what it designs. The question she poses is one we often mull over at TANK: “Do we really need more stuff in the world?” Her answer is to make fewer yet better things, objects that make your heart overrule your head: “We set out to design something so beautiful that every time you look at it, you want to get it out of the cupboard and wear it, no matter which decade you’re living in. To me, that is timelessness.”

Arriving at such objects, for Choi, is a matter of method. Her moodboards are designed to transmit feelings before a single shoe is produced. Choi insists that the moodboard is “just a starting point”, and the final product arrives as something unexpected. For the Pearl Capsule, the moodboards leant into untraditional, surprising ways of wearing pearls.

That same care makes Choi acutely aware of fashion’s accelerating cycles. Collections now spend months in development and showrooms before reaching the shop floor, only to be pushed into sale a few months later. “That cycle is vicious,” she acknowledges. She wants pieces to “marinate”, so someone might return to them once their confidence has caught up. Every collection requires her to balance functionality, seasonality, brand DNA and a crowded marketplace: “The core for me is that we are Jimmy Choo: what does that stand for? Three decades later, I’d like to think we got it, and that we stayed within our boundaries whilst constantly refreshing.”

If this capsule is about an anniversary, it’s also a message for the next generation. Choi is frank about instant gratification: today’s young creatives are “so capable, so good at multitasking”, but she worries whether that is enough to build something that lasts. Design, she insists, is not art: art can remain an idea made tangible for its own sake; design must find a wearer, a life. “You want to be so good at something that they can’t take it away from you,” she says. “You’re going to have to do it again, but better, and slightly different.”

Her own design timeline reads like a condensed history of contemporary fashion. The first decade was fun and frenetic, the shoes she wanted to wear on a night out doubling as prototypes. The 2000s brought everything “shinier and louder and crazier”, heels sharper and higher, the market crowded with new names. Now her teenage daughter rejects the high street for vintage and archive, insisting on pieces that feel singular. That stance sent Choi back into the brand’s own closets, mining the archives to understand what has given Jimmy Choo its staying power.

In the Pearl Capsule, the silhouettes are familiar enough to be legible – a pump, a sandal, a minaudière – but the way pearls are deployed destabilises any neat reading. Three decades in, the brand that helped define the modern high heel is still asking the question that matters most: what does it mean to last? Its manifesto is written in small, luminous gestures: a baroque pearl flower stitched to a vamp, a line of spheres marching along a strap, a glint of nacre caught in motion as someone steps into the night. .

All shoes and bags by Jimmy Choo

Photography assistant: Marcello Monti

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THE SHAPE OF WISDOM

Jimmy Choo helped codify the heel as an aspirational object, as collectable and storied as a gentleman’s watch