'My days are never the same; every two minutes they change. However, early in the morning I am just mummy to my two girls, Nine [pronounced Neen], who is 11, and Violette, who is five. They both go to the same school nearby and I do the school run. They only ever seem to have five minutes to dress, then the dog barks, the cat miaows and the maid wants money. After the school run, I drop by a coffee shop opposite the school with the other mums to have breakfast. We start the day laughing.
By 9.45am, I am in the office dealing with lots of
e-mails. Half of them are charity requests - there's usually about five asking me to open a sausage festival in northern France or something like that - and the others are e-mails from friends. Armelle [my assistant] is my 'brain'. She used to work with Lagerfeld at Chanel. She follows me everywhere; she's quick and she never forgets. For 15 hours a day, she is reminding me to do this or that.
I can't tell you what my title is because I don't really have one. What do you call someone in fashion who empties the garbage, answers the phone, buys furniture for the new Hong Kong store and explains to Suzy Menkes [fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune] what we are doing here at Roger Vivier? [Vivier created the stiletto heel in 1954 and is known as the Heel King.]
I could be called a muse, which is very poetic, but a muse doesn't have appointments with the chairmen of department stores. I don't want a title, but I could be described as the gardeur de temps - I am the guardian of the name, the brand of Roger Vivier.
I have appointments with artists who design our promotional material or with the young guy who is creating our website. A journalist will drop by, a customer who wants to see me, or a celebrity, and I will have coffee with them.
Bruno [Frisoni, the designer who is continuing Vivier's legacy] works much of the time at the shoe factory in Italy and I go for meetings there, where we go through the prototypes and talk general politics of the house. Having worked with talented people such as Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier, and been a designer myself, I have an innate understanding of how design and prototypes work. I also consider whether the collection is lacking bags or jewellery, but I would never dictate to the designer. I admire Bruno immensely. My role here is not to be creative in the products, but creative in the Vivier brand.