But according to the actress, her fascination with the accessory began long before she landed a role as a fashion-obsessed NYC woman on the iconic television show. And in an interview withGwyneth Paltrowon Paltrow’s newGoop podcast, explaining her longtime love for all kinds of shoes, which dates back to when she was a young girl living in Cincinnati.
“I’ve always loved them but not in the way that Carrie Bradshaw loved them,” she tells Paltrow in the interview. “I didn’t know you could love shoes and then have them, you know? When I was living in Cincinnati, there was a shoe store in this place called Kenwood which was a pretty serious drive from our neighborhood. But we went twice a year. We went at the end of August for our school shoes for the year, and then we would go, we would get fall/winter shoes and then spring/summer shoes. So we got two pairs of shoes a year, and then we had a pair of Mary Jane’s — proper Mary Janes. But if my sister outgrew hers then I would just get my sister’s.”
The actress, who is one of eight children, explains how much the trips to that shoe store fascinated her: the smell of leather, the cold air conditioning in the summer and the blasting heat in the winter.
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“In those days, there weren’t anything but leather shoes. It did’t matter how much money you had, there weren’t the Targets of the world or the Walmarts,” she explains. “These were mom and pop independently owned shoe stores. I really would pick up all the shoes and I would smell them and I would look at the stitching on the soles, I would look at the sock liners, I would fantasize knowing full well what shoe my mom was going to make me get, but they were beautiful. It smelled so incredible and I loved my new shoes. Even if they really weren’t the shoes I wanted, I loved a new pair of shoes.”
But the ritual of shopping for the accessories isn’t the only prominent childhood memory she has about them. Parker says she and her siblings also learned how to take care of them, in order to make sure they lasted throughout the entire year.
“My mom got out newspaper and every Sunday, she got out the Kiwi shoe polish and we were all lined up and we had to polish our own shoes every Sunday to keep them as nice as we could cause we weren’t getting another pair.”
Little did she know back then that one day she’d not only have access to the most mesmerizing shoes on the market, but she’d also create some of those shoes on her own — a task that she was very careful about when the time came.
“A while after the show ended, and I think even after I did the second movie, a bunch of companies were asking if I’d consider going into business with them and it was very exciting and I was very flattered and I had lots of very interesting meetings with big shoe people, but they all wanted me to make the shoes in China and sell them for $69, $99 and those margins were incredibly seductive for everybody and it just meant, like, we would all be rich.,” she tells Paltrow, explaining that she “just had a hard time saying yes.”
“We were talking about stuff and the shoe category came up and one of them said to me, ‘well what do you want to do?’ And I said, “well what I really want to do is to go into business with George Malkemus III but he’s already spoken for, he’s the CEO of Manolo [Blahnik].”
Parker continues, “They were like, have you asked him? And they said just ask him.”
So she did. After leaving the restaurant, she got Malkemus on the phone — and the answer was an immediate “yes.”
“I got a phone and I went outside and I called George and I said, “George I know this is a long shot but would you go into business with me?' And he said, ‘be at my office tomorrow morning 9am.’ And I was and we wanted all the same things.”
For more from Parker, listen to the full podcast,here.
source: people.com
