Fern Mallis Flies to India to Secure Christian Louboutin for Fashion Icons Series at 92Y
EXPRESS TO INDIA: Fern Mallis will go to great lengths to line up guests for her Fashion Icons series — so much so she took a 15-hour flight to New Delhi last year to invite Christian Louboutin.
The shoe designer will join her at 92Y May 17. While Mallis had only met Louboutin to say hello here and there over the years, she said Wednesday, “You can safely say I went to India to secure this.”
During a dinner last fall in New York, her friend Sabyasachi Mukherjee, a designer from India, mentioned that he was doing a shoe collaboration with Louboutin. After learning that the shoe designer was on her wish list for 92Y speakers, he promised to invited her to the launch. In November, Mallis flew to New Delhi for the weekend to attend the launch dinner where she was seated next to Louboutin. After chatting about her talk series, she dropped off a copy of her book “Fashion Icons” at his hotel the following day and turned up for the official launch later. “I would go anywhere to support Sabyasachi but my purpose was totally to spend some time with Christian and secure this interview,” Mallis said.
Having visited India 50 times in the past 17 years, Mallis will be back in Mumbai at the end of next month for a board meeting for Tara Jewels Ltd., the maker of diamonds or fine jewelry for Monique Lhuillier, Zac Posen and Angel Sanchez among others.
Once the date for 92Y was squared away, Mallis made a point of stopping by Louboutin’s uptown store for his event for Glenn Close’s charity Bring Change 2 Mind earlier this year. Since opening his first store in Paris in 1992, Louboutin has sold footwear, handbags, small leather goods and beauty products and now has more than 100 stores. Mallis even picked up some insights during a recent vacation in Bali with a friend who is an editor at Indian Vogue who had done a big interview with the shoe designer. And one of her neighbor’s also had a funny store or two so “I’m really looking forward to this,” Mallis said. “For all intents and purposes, he is a really interesting guy and has an interesting life…I read he has a house in Aleppo which I will ask him about. It’s not the kind of place I would like to go for a weekend. I’m sure at one point it must have been really beautiful.”
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