Designer interview: Terry and Liz de Havilland
Terry and Liz de Havilland have launched a new shoe label, Archie Eyebrows, supplying dandy shoes to tough dudes the world over. MARIAN BUCKLEY meets the creators at their East London studio.
Outside 336 Kingsland Road is a big, lairy glary sign that says Archie Eyebrows. I'm at the HQ heart and first boutique of Terry and Liz de Havilland's new shoe label.
In February 2008 Archie Eyebrows made its London Fashion Week debut at the Edward Sexton and PPQ shows. For its first season, Archie offers slick cuban heel shoes and boots in metallic finishes and snakeskin. Two and 3/4 inch heels (there are also 1 and 3/4 inch versions) are not for every man, but Archie's owner, Liz de Havilland is sure of her customer. "We spot Archie's round here every day," she tells me. "Archie is tough and camp," concurs husband Terry who has no official role in the new company, "I'm just a consultant." And where did they get the name for this enterprise? "It's from the film Zoolander," Terry tells me. Liz continues with the story. "We were watching it and there's that bit when they get to the end of the catwalk and Terry said 'Archie Eyebrows' because that's what they were doing, arching their eyebrows. And was it." They also toyed with the idea of launching a range called Fashion Rejects, but Archie won out. Liz explains how she met Terry, coming to dinner 16 years ago "and basically never I left. I was expecting this really camp guy because I'd seen all these shoes he made for trannies - I wasn't expecting this East End geezer". The pair married in 2003.
There aren't many shoe designers whose reputation and name holds international gravitas, but Terry de Havilland is one of the most talented this country has ever produced. Dubbed the rock'n'roll cobbler, the craft is in his blood: he grew up watching both his father and his mother making shoes, first in a shed at the bottom of the garden and then in their own factory. An East End lad born in Mile End in 1938, after completing his National Service, Terry Higgins (his birth name) spent a year in Rome with ambitions to become an actor and his first wife Sandy and he found the name de Havilland in a phone book. Terry returned to London in 1960 and started helping his dad make shoes. They had a major breakthrough with winklepickers which Terry struck up a deal selling to a boutique on the Kings Road, soon Queen magazine picked up on the shoes and Paul Smith started stocking them. In the late 60s after stumbling across some of his dad's platform shoes which had been made for the black market, Terry started making his own platforms which were immediately picked-up on by Johnny Moke who sold them in Kensington Market. Soon rock chicks including Britt Ekland, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenburg and Marianne Faithfull were all partying in de Havillands.
In 970 following Terry's father's death in an accident at the factory, Terry took over the family business. The shop 'Cobblers To The World' opened on the Kings Road with, as Terry recalls, "The three C's - champagne, caviar and cocaine". Yet despite the persistent partying, Terry's factory was producing 800 pairs of shoes a week in the 70s. "I really was off my head a lot of the time," he tells me with a beaming face. "I'd come in to the shop and I'd think I was alright, you know, but then I'd realise I was still out of it. I spent a lot of time in the back doing drugs." Clients included Angie and David Bowie, Cher, Lulu and Jackie Kennedy. "I didn't have a clue who these people were" confesses Terry. What attracts so many people to Terry's designs is that they (copies aside) are totally original and distinctive. Terry doesn't draw designs on paper. "If you do that you lose something - it's not the same on paper. You give a drawing to someone and they cut it out and it won't be the same on the last." Instead, Terry draws his designs directly onto the last by hand. Currently, Terry de Havilland is only creating bespoke shoes - the retail label exists under licence for another two years and Terry has a limited role but customers can visit him at the studio and get a one-on-one personal service with prices ranging from £225-£450 for a bespoke pair.
After huge success with platforms, wedges and flamboyant creations in the 70s which are still beloved by shoe enthusiasts the world over, Terry became disillusioned and retreated into making goth shoes, boots and continued catering for the fetish market in the 80s. "I bloody hated some of those shoes," he says, "but at the time it was what was selling." It was only in the late 90s that Terry realised that his original designs from the 60s and 70s were being sold at auction for hundreds of pounds and fans such as Stephen Philips from Rellik boutique, were building collections. "We've been up and we've been down, but now we're on the up again," explains Liz. Terry has yet to meet Miuicca Prada whose label Miu Miu released shoes extremely similar to Terry's in 2003, but the cost and the strain of a legal dispute proved too much to make it worth pursuing. "We'd still like to meet her - it's not right that you can get away with copying someone, but we're not stressing about it," explains Liz. Archie Eyebrows gives the pair complete freedom - Terry is no longer hands-on creating shoes in a factory, all production takes place in Spain. Liz tells me that "England has lost its shoe industry- we've had this discussion with Skills Fast recently. They, said 'we need apprentices' and we said 'well where are you going to send them China? Cos you can't send them anywhere in England, there are no factories'. And they are finding that in Spain now, the kids don't want to go into factories, they prefer working in hotels and bars" says Liz. "They have an aging workforce" agrees Terry. Can this cobbling crisis be turned around? "No," states Terry. "England's lost it. You can do quality here, but you can't do much production here. That's why I am having fun working with tailors because they control everything they do."
There's no doubt that signature de Havilland shoes have a powerful impact on the wearer and many classic styles have simply never gone out of fashion. In 2008 the Margo (originally designed in 1973) has enjoyed a revival and Terry is working with Jodie Harsh ("that's a hoot"), Amy Winehouse donned de Havillands in her 'Fuck Me Pumps' video, pairs have featured in Sex and The City and Harry Potter and Terry's creations have graced the catwalks at Tom Baker, Frost French and Gavin Douglas shows."Gavin is a lovely guy," Terry affirms. "Colin McDowell rang me up and asked me would I do the shoes for his London Fashion Week debut and I was happy to - he's very refreshing to work with." The impetus for Archie Eyebrows literally came from looking at what the clued-up folk around Shoreditch are wearing. "We were inspired by how guys have been dressing up again," explains Liz. "Menswear is very exciting right now - men really are starting to dandy up and we haven't seen that for years - tailoring is so important - and men are now really taking time to consider what they wear and we're even seeing the return of hats." Terry expands: "We also saw all these guys wearing skinny jeans and ties and they had nothing on their feet that looked right so we thought 'cuban heels'." The pair saw spotted a need for heeled shoes for trendy dudes, Liz says: "You look at what they are wearing and you think, 'that ain't right. The heels are too low and they're turning right up in the air, they've got these tight trousers on so their feet look that long and they're all turning up. We saw a kid outside the studio the other week and he'd bought a pair of lace-up brogues and had taken then to a cobblers and had the heel built up - they were pitching forward so he was having so much trouble walking in them, the balance was all gone."
Terry's had experience of creating cuban heels in the 60s. "They are complete slags to walk in - I know cos that's what my dad did. He'd get these gangsters come in Crombie coats, big guys but not tall, and they'd try and walk in these built-up heels and they'd look really odd." The key to making a heel work is, according to Terry, "the pitch of it all - it's the angle." Platforms need a toe spring Liz explains, otherwise they are difficult to walk in. A toe spring isn't a physical entity, "it's that space, just a space" a gap in the last. Getting the pitch right is central to the de Havilland approach to shoe design, this is the way weight is distributed across the shoe - with a heel it's important to have the correct pitch at the toe because if you don't get that right, the wearer will be unable to walk comfortably. Each design is a feat of engineering and Terry literally intuits what works best. "With 7 inch heels it's tricky, " Terry reveals. "You are going get some heel flick, the higher you go the more fulcrum it provides, the actual pitch alters from size to size - you have to have different moulds for different sizes..." De Havilland insoles are different because they "have a really long shank - that's what provides you with the strength.. as the sizes change, the heels vary slightly, you can't use the same heel on a size 4 as on a size 6 and so on, so you have to get model makers and you have to sit with then to make sure they are doing it right. Then you make a sample of it and then you put it into moulds, but you might have to put into anything from 6 to 8 moulds." Soon all Terry's components, made to his exacting specifications by an expert in Spain, will be built and shipped to London. This will give the de Havilland's the ability to do all their the sampling in England."
Archie's first collection - which has five styles of Amechi shoes, three Larry boot styles, one Charlie boot and four Lenny boots including gold and silver versions - is just the beginning. Next will come Archie's Ladies ("cuban heels for women"), followed by a sexier, up to 7 inch heeled range called Archie's Mistresses. For the Mistresses, they have collaborated with jeweller William Griffith to develop a range of 'Tom Foolery', solid silver jewellery custom designed for their shoes. "It's all about the loop," says Terry showing me his signature loop. "It's Terry's loop" and it sits at the top of the shoe's heel which enables them to securely attach jewellery. Along with the Kingsland Road boutique, dubbed Archie East, there are plans for a collaborative boutique in Soho - Archie Central - and Liz is enthusiastic about launching a perfume: "L'eau de Cobblers we'd call it." Liz and Terry are a formidable force: they laugh and joke constantly, and enjoy each other's verbal dexterity, punctuating their sentences with puns. For them, Archie Eyebrows could never be about conventional fashion. "We're off season," quips Liz and they have no use for trend prediction agencies. "If they look good on, they look good on" states Terry, simple as that. And, despite varying fortunes over the years there is no bitterness,"otherwise you'd just die of bile wouldn't you?' he observes. For Terry, the worst part of their job is "meeting insincere wankers. We treat it as business but we are also honourable". Words of wisdom and experience, from the King of Cobblers - and long may this royal cobbling couple reign.
Archie East boutique is at 336 Kingsland Road E8, telephone: 020 7923 0431.
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