A true New York treasure, Sarah Jessica Parker today hosted a preview of the shoes and accessories in her SJP Collection for Nordstrom at an airy pop-up shop on 372 W. Broadway (next door to Cipriani Downtown) that will be open for three days starting this Friday.

Wearing a pleated, powder pink dress that played to the shop’s ladylike color scheme, Parker milled around refreshingly absent of a publicist and struck up conversations with an ebullient, “Hi there.” One needn’t much more to feel compelled to bring home a piece of the moment—i.e. a pair of her fabulous new shoes.

The Inspiration: Italy by Way of New York, Circa the 1970s
Created with business partner and longtime Manolo Blahnik CEO George Malkemus, the SJP Collection is a love letter to New York, a generation of Sex and the City fans, and a very specific, idealized woman who lived in New York and Italy in the 1970s. In Parker’s words, the muse was “drawn from moments in our past or things we saw in the streets in Italy in 1979, or the crosstown bus in 1981.”

With a razor sharp suit and a Texas drawl, Malkemis recalled how Parker described her muse to him, “Think of the lady in Florence in 1977. She had a jean that was slightly flared and she had on a clog and she carried a bag a certain way,” she had told him. But the collection is not a literal nod to the ’70s, it’s more subtle and timeless, concentrating on the colors and spirit of the era, with references to designers like Charles Jourdan and others whom the duo have a shared admiration for.

How Parker and Malkemis Balanced High Craftsmanship with Reasonable Prices
On Parker and Malkemis’ insistence, the shoes are made in Italy by a third generation Tuscan shoemaker. “We wanted to make these shoes in Italy, we wanted to make them at a certain price point, we wanted the fit to be completely, inarguably perfect, and the comfort to be everything a woman wants and needs and should get for the dollar amount she’s paying,” said Parker.

With prices from $195 to $500, there are classic pumps (about 3 inches to our eye), strappy heels with bows and florets on the toe, espadrilles (made exceptionally in Spain, where all great espadrilles are made), lace-up booties in “luggage” brown, plenty of open-toe mules and sandals for summer, and, of course, there is a “Carrie” shoe, not to mention a pair of black patent Mary Janes. (Remember the Sex and the City episode where Carrie finds the black patent Manolo Blahnik Mary Janes, the ones she thought were “an urban shoe myth”?)

A few handbags—a roomy clutch, a tote, a small handheld—and a “Manhattan” trench coat round out the line. The color palette is bright, but the silhouettes are simple-chic. “It really was about the single sole and color, and color as a neutral. We treat color as if it’s as appropriate for the office as anything else,” says Parker on the line’s mauvy pinks, Easter egg blues, greens, and purples, and Studio 54-worthy metallics.

“This Isn’t a Licensing Deal”
One thing is certain: you can shop the SJP Collection knowing that everything—down to the signature grosgrain ribbon accents that mimic the ribbons Parker wore in her hair as a child—is a derivative of Parker’s personal style and longstanding love of fashion and fashion culture.

“Any work I do—Coty or Sex and the City—anything I produce, I am not someone who steps in and out. I don’t know how to do that, and I feel honor-bound by the opportunity and I don’t want to be told ‘here’s the end product,'” says Parker of her hands-on role. “There isn’t a meeting I miss or a phone call, conference call, or email. I am on every chain. I am in every meeting . . . This isn’t a licensing deal. This is a partnership. We own this business together.”

Malkemis said that in his meetings with Parker, where they’d sit on the floor with bowls of soup, she told him, “George, they cannot be designer shoe prices. I don’t want them to be Manolo Blahnik, Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, or Lanvin. I want them to be something that the woman who’s followed me as Carrie Bradshaw for 10 years on Sex and the City can go into a store [and buy].” And from the start, the two agreed that Nordstrom was the only home for the line.

Business partnership aside, the design union of Parker and Malkemis is one of total friendship and joy. “It’s truly one of the most passionate things I’ve ever done,” says Malkemis. “She is so generous and so thoughtful and so respectful of everyone, and to me that matters a great deal. In the fashion business you meet a lot of people who are not always that way. So to have a person that takes care of each person individually, with the same respect that she would some very famous person, is very refreshing.”

Source – Gotham Magazine

I Don’t Know How She Does It is the title of one of her films, but it’s also a genuine question you’re likely to have after meeting Sarah Jessica Parker. The fashionista of Sex and the City fame has come straight from a parent-teacher conference to discuss her current passion project, which, as fans of her footwear-obsessed SATC character Carrie Bradshaw will find quite fitting, is a line of shoes. The style icon will release the SJP Collection by Sarah Jessica Parker, 25 styles of boots, pumps, and heels as well as two bags and a trench coat, exclusively at Nordstrom on February 28 and will be in LA to present her new collection at The Grove on March 6 from 5-6 p.m.; she will meet customers and sign their SJP purchase throughout the event (as time permits). Parker took a moment from her whirlwind lifestyle to sit down with Haute Living and discuss how she convinced Manolo Blahnik CEO George Malkemus to become her business partner, why there had to be a “Carrie” in the collection and the truth behind the rumors she’ll be taking over for Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

Haute Living: How did the collaboration come about?
Sarah Jessica Parker: I had had some other opportunities [to do collections in the past] and wasn’t quite sure about them, but I still felt there was one idea I hadn’t yet pursued. It was my big dream, and rather bold of me to work with George [Manolo Blahnik CEO George Malkemus]. We first met in 1985, but I got to know him while working on Sex and the City. I was having lunch with friends, all successful businesswomen, who told me to pick up the phone and be brave. [When he answered] I told him it was a long shot, and asked if he would consider producing a shoe collection with me. He told me to be at his office at 9 AM. Before I met with George, I knew I wanted to do a beautiful collection that I could speak of with genuine enthusiasm. I wanted it to be made in Italy, and I wanted it to be affordable, not $1000 shoes. I wound up partnering with someone who wanted the same things I wanted coincidentally, and wonderfully, someone who had a position of reference. [George] arrived in New York at the same time I did. As a young woman taking the cross-town bus, the same things I saw upon my arrival were the same things he saw. I wanted a collection that wasn’t so much ’70s, but where the inspiration [of the ’70s] was a driving force. I wanted to make purple T-straps that could be worn to dinner or work and that could be used as a neutral; I wanted purple to become the new black.

Haute Living: Can you walk us through the collection, how each piece directly recalls a time in your life?
Sarah Jessica Parker: The shoes aren’t drastically from many different points in my life. The inspiration was the late ’70s and the mod resistance of New York , Charles Jourdan, Susan Bennis and Warren Edwards and countless others that were prominently a part of the New York shoe business. [I incorporated grosgrain ribbon] because when I was a little girl, I had to wear ribbons in my hair every day. We were required to wear them by our mother, so we took them out of the ribbon drawer and ironed them ourselves. Sitting on the floor with George — where we conduct all our business – I said, ‘George, do you think we could put grosgrain on the back of each shoe?’ He was delighted with the idea and it became our signature, as well as a nice nod to my mother. We picked a beautiful, salmon-y peach color, which is incorporated into every shoe. In a wonderfully crowded shoe market, it’s a nice distinguishing signature.

Haute Living: Do you have a favorite piece or pieces in the collection?
Sarah Jessica Parker: I don’t have a favorite. There’s a few that I’ve been inclined to wear more than others. [The collection] is suited to different ages and sizes, it’s cross- generational, but there are certain ones I love. I’m fond of the Carrie, the Tawny in French blue, the Etta in charcoal and dusty rose, the Pola in black and the Wallace in berry and raisin The Alison is a great boot alternative for women who don’t like to wear a traditional heel.

Haute Living: There were rumors that you’d be filling Anna Wintour’s shoes at Vogue. Do you think the rumors were just the media’s wishful thinking that life might imitate art?
Sarah Jessica Parker: [That rumor] started because we had lunch a couple weeks ago. We were waiting at the elevator bank, and I was saying goodbye. We do have lunch occasionally. I was in no way positioning for that job, and she’s not going anywhere, thank goodness. There are about 1001 people far better suited than me who are equipped to take on such a massive, important role, but I’m definitely not the one.

Read our full interview with Sarah Jessica, learn more about her well-heeled style and see her full shoe colleciton in the upcoming issue of Haute Living Magazine Los Angeles.

Source – Haute Living

One might think that Sarah Jessica Parker’s love affair with shoes started with her infamous Sex and the City character, Carrie Bradshaw, but not so explains Parker at the Tuesday preview of her new SJP collection with George Malkemus and Nordstrom. “George and I had met long before I played Carrie Bradshaw,” she says. “George came out to Los Angeles to a store called Madeleine Gallay that was on Sunset Plaza, in 1985. I didn’t have two freaking nickels to rub together, but I came to this trunk show, and I ordered six pair of shoes. I must have done it, literally, on a layaway or on an American Express, it’s the same card I have today. George and Manolo [Blahnik] had swatches and styles, and we put together six pairs of shoes.”

That shared enthusiasm is what brought Parker and Malkemus together again on their 30-piece line of single-sole heels, espadrilles, flats, and thongs and handbags and trenches, which hits Nordstrom stores on February 28. Here, VF Daily talks to the twosome.

VF Daily: Why do the shoes all have names?

Sarah Jessica Parker: If you were a lady and a consumer of shoes, you would see that it’s uncommon for a shoe not to have a name. I think it’s nice to connect with the shoe, but I would agonize over every name. There were a lot of shoes to be named, and I took it extremely seriously.

George Malkemus: Carrie was probably the hardest to come up with, because it’s probably the most famous name for many, many, many women for many, many years.

VF Daily: There seems to be a 70s influence.

SJP: I think people are expecting one thing, or those people who didn’t really remember it sort of think of it as the disco era, but really, it was that single sole and those colors. It was the Maud Frizon and the Charles Jourdan, and those wonderfully flat colors, eggplant and aubergine, eggplant and grape, asparagus and teal. The simpler something is, the harder it is to produce it really well, but that’s what we wanted to do. George has this incredible shoemaker in Tuscany, a third-generation shoemaker who was equally excited to revisit this idea, too, because he knew that period so well.

VF Daily: What happened to those six pairs of shoes you designed with George and Manolo?

SJP: They were later stolen, those shoes, a bunch of them were stolen. All my luggage was stolen when I was traveling; it was very, very sad. From the time I was on my own at 17, it was just peering into windows, imagining, and spending my time on that crosstown bus, looking in the windows of Bonwit Teller, Bendel’s, Bennis/Edwards, Ferragamo, and Maud Frizon. You know what I said to my daughters yesterday? We were spending the day together, and we went to the grocery store. I said, “Have you window shopped?” and they said, “No, what is window shopping?” I said, “Window shopping is shopping with your imagination, so we can see everything.”

VF Daily: Has Manolo seen the finished products?

Malkemus: Well, I wouldn’t put anything past him, but you know what, it’s meant to be two different worlds. As I said, this is a different woman. This is a woman who doesn’t go into Bergdorf Goodman and spend $20,000 on shoes in an afternoon.

SJP: Maybe he’s secretly following @SJPCollection on Instagram.

VF Daily: It’s been 10 years since Sex and the City went off the air; did you realize that this show still has this cultural pull?

SJP: I think for so long I was completely ignorant of any relationship an audience may or may not have with the show. Forgive me for repeating it, but I did not understand—I think I was so entrenched in the work, and because I was producing the show, and acting in it, and by the end I had a new child, my first child, I did not understand this significance culturally. It wasn’t until the last episode aired, and I was sitting on a couch with my husband at home, and I was watching CNN, and a crawl went by, and it said, “Carrie ended up with Big,” or something like this. I was like, “They can run Carrie, like, without any point of reference around it,” and that was the first time I ever understood that there was an audience that was larger than the people we were shooting with every day. You know, the crowds had grown on the street, and I recognized that, but I never read reviews, I don’t read press, I don’t want to pay attention to the peripheral chitchat.

Malkemus: We have busloads of women—you know, there’s a Sex and the City tour—and they stop in front of Manolo Blahnik, and they’ll get out, and they’ll be these lovely women from London, and they just have to have the Sex and the City shoe. They will say, “I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever thought I was going to spend this kind of money on shoes, but I’ve got to have this, because I’m getting married.” At first I would think, You really want to get married in the shoe that Carrie got married in, but didn’t get married? She didn’t even get married in that, but she did have the shoe in a fantastic apartment on Fifth Avenue.

VF Daily: And today, people still stop in front of the Perry Street house that Carrie Bradshaw lived in.

SJP: Because we live around the corner from that, and I’m nearing the southwest corner of Perry Street, I try to make a diagonal beeline.

Malkemus: But the phenomenal thing about women who are like, “I’ve got to have a cosmo because of Sex and the City.” It’s like, really? Is that what you really want to drink?

SJP: It’s a nice drink I’ve only recently discovered. It’s actually delicious.

VF Daily: Really?

SJP: Yeah, they’re quite good. I had one last night with a nice amount of lemon in it, and it was delicious, and, of course, the bartender was like, “Naturally.” I was like, “No, I really don’t drink cosmopolitans.” I’ve only recently, like, in the very recent past, even considered ordering one. I felt so embarrassed doing it. I’m not a drinker, so I don’t know what else to order, but it was delicious.

VF Daily: Michael Patrick King recently said that a third Sex and the City movie could be possible.

SJP: I’m glad he finally at least said something. It’s off my back!

VF Daily: Is anyone working on this—writing a script, are there talks?

SJP: No, nothing, or at least nothing beyond how we taunt the public with various quotes.

Source – Vanity Fair