Dressing up with Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon

Kim Kardashian Instagrammed a picture of herself wearing the leather legging boots from my latest collection underneath a Givenchy leather skirt. Within ten minutes it had half a million likes. She has such an incredible figure, I think she would have looked better wearing them with just a T-shirt and a jacket.

To collect my OBE at the Palace I wore a Dolce & Gabbana polka dot outfit with a fur collar and a fedora from Loro Piana. I wanted to look like someone going to Ascot in the 1970s. The Queen, who was wearing her classic pumps with a square heel, said, ‘Oh, I hear you make shoes.’

My parents dressed in a very classic 1970s style. My mother, a former Chanel model, always wore a headscarf turban and long red nails, and she was always smoking.

When I was ten my parents had a party with Vidal and Beverly Sassoon because my father was in business with them. Beverly was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She wore a silver lamé halterneck top with high-waisted bell-bottom trousers and an Elsa Peretti cuff on each wrist.

My first shoe obsession was a pair of brown cowboy boots. I was on a trip in Paris with my convent school, aged six, and I made the nuns buy them for me. I don’t know how I persuaded them — I must have been pretty determined.

My personal style has always been based on a clean, masculine look with a sexy edge; since leaving Jimmy Choo it’s got more minimal. I love James Perse T-shirts and Converse trainers.

I went to finishing school in Switzerland when I was 16. I was the only girl who had black leather Alaïa trousers. The other girls weren’t jealous, they just thought it was odd.

When I was 17 I sneaked into my first fashion show at the Duke of York’s barracks on the King’s Road. I sat in someone else’s seat and the PR guru Lynne Franks [on whom Edina Monsoon was based in Absolutely Fabulous] pointed at me and shouted, ‘Who is that?’ I backed into the crowd in a sweaty panic.

It was incredibly exciting when we first took Jimmy Choo to the Oscars in the late 1990s. We took all the shoes in white satin so we could dye them to match any dress. We dyed Cate Blanchett’s in a hotel bathroom.

The fashion world now is drowning in commercialism; we’re afraid to take risks. My favourite decade is the 1970s. I get a lot of inspiration from Helmut Newton’s shoots for French Vogue; I love the decadence.