Fab fashions of the 1960s had a problem with feet. Where to find extreme shoes in Britain where almost all footwear was industrially produced for chainstore sale? Where were the equivalents of those affordable artisans in Italy or Spain?
Answer: in east London, among them Terry de Havilland, working for his bespoke cobbler father in Barking. He had been playing with leather scraps and wooden lasts since infancy and had unbridled ideas about exotic and erotic materials, shape and decoration.
The design-educated founders of the new shoe boutiques of the mid-60s, such as Chelsea Cobbler or Sids, had to scout around, often among Greek migrant communities, for skilled hands to execute their concepts; De Havilland, who has died aged 81, could turn his own, or a customer’s, fantasy into a wearable pair overnight.
His most successful fantasy (“I was taking a lot of acid at the time”) was to use some of his father’s old 40s lasts for platform-soled, wedge and stacked heel shoes, found in the loft in 1969, to make trippy samples in snakeskin for a friend to sell in Kensington Market. The family factory could hardly cope with the demand; after his father died there in 1970 in an electrical accident, De Havilland (whose original surname was Higgins) had just five days off, then continued production.
He set up his own shop, Cobblers to the World, on the King’s Road, Chelsea, in 1972, which became party central for stylists, models, rock stars, rock stars’ wives and ex-wives: Angie Bowie was for a while De Havilland’s live-in girlfriend.
Customers were the glamorous, high, low and dodgy: python boots for Rudolf Nureyev, black leather thigh boots with red satin linings for Jackie Onassis, spangled platforms for David Bowie and Marc Bolan and ankle-strapped ones for Tim Curry’s Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Long after the shop closed De Havilland was still the go-to specialist for neoprene combat boots for Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft and height enhancers for Madonna, the Spice Girls, Kylie, Beyonce, Britney Spears, Kate Moss, Amy Winehouse and Dita Von Teese, all of whom expected to wear his shoes dancing every night without breaking legs or necks.
He satisfied them and the 200,000 unstarry women who bought his three-tier wedges in the 70s. Cher and Bette Midler shared De Havillands for years, until Cher, on discovering he was still alive in 1995, but at yet another career nadir, ordered 13 pairs to make sure she never ran out.
He always explained that his attraction to elegant feet and sexy gait had started when he was a small boy, viewing his father’s female customers from peep toe through ankle strap to stocking seams; father confected black-market wartime shoes from scavenged scraps for clients including West End showgirls and dancers from the rude nude Windmill theatre in Soho.
The Higginses later expanded to a small factory, Waverley Shoes, to produce some orthopaedic, some flash, shoes, including the winkle-pickers with “huge dangerous points” favoured by the Kray family entourage. Young Terry picked the De Havilland name out of a phone book because he wanted to be a film star; after a brief attempt at that, he went back in 1957 to the family business, where his first original experiment was chopping the points off winkle-picker lasts.
Queen magazine’s fashion editor, Anne Trehearne, spotted a pair of De Havillands worn on a King’s Road shoot by his model and girlfriend in 1964, featured his work and brought in his first big-money clients. The rock world then was beginning to explore the theatrical appeal of 40s exaggeration in clothing and shoes. That’s when he looked in the loft for the platform lasts and wedges: “They put you up on a stage,” he said.
De Havilland remembered the party lifestyle of his Cobblers years vividly – from caviar, champagne, cocaine on opening day to pouring milk into shoe samples to feed stray cats – but he never learned how to do retail. He instinctually created artworks on the last, delivered the goods on time and came up with ideas others monetised years later (cone heels, clear plastic stilettos). However he did not recognise seasons, let alone fashion evolution. Punks got all the power they could afford from over-the-counter Doc Martens, and Cobblers went into liquidation in 1979.
Since someone would always pay for a mad alternative to the vogue, De Havilland did not give up his antique sewing machine. There came, without his name on the label, Kamikaze Shoes for stilettos and goth boots, which went bust in 1989, and both The Magic Shoe Company and a Camden Market shop, which stocked glamrock for burlesque and transvestites, fetishwear for actual fetishists and Transmuter spiked boots for the goth-rock singer Marilyn Manson.
De Havilland disappeared so much from public view that Cher, who tracked him down in 1995, had assumed that he was dead, as likely did Prada’s Miu Miu label, which produced near-copies of his 70s top hit in 2003. Prada claimed these were a “homage”, eventually paying a settlement, and the publicity about the affair, with high prices for his real vintage pairs, energised him after a heart attack.
From 2003 to his death, he produced and sold new ranges, both directly and through licensing, inventively reworking his artworks “between the fierce and the gorgeous”.
He also crafted couture pairs in his Dalston studio: Kate Moss went on her honeymoon with “fuck me” and “fuck you” spelled out in crystal on her platform soles.
Students at the London College of Fashion, where he was visiting professor, adored his racy stories; he became a member of the Cordwainers advisory panel, and was given a Drapers’ lifetime achievement award in 2010.
With geezer candour, he said it was always about sex, and that being a shoemaker charmed women, including Sandy Conlin, the mother of his son Perry; ex-Windmill girl Perin Lewis, mother of Jason; Angie Burdon, mother of Caesar; and his wife, Liz, whom he met in 1990 when she was modelling fetishwear. She had the hard business head he had lacked. They delayed their 2003 wedding to complete rush orders.
Liz, his three sons, and his grandchildren, Joseph, Leila, Jamie, India and Kai, survive him.
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