Style first. Access further.

Ask Jeannette Jamison what her house is about and she will not begin with shoes. She begins with a fitting room: the quiet moment when a woman who has walked past every rack in the store is told, again, that the beautiful pair only goes up to a ten. Everything the house does is an answer to that moment.

Most brands that serve larger sizes treat them as an afterthought, a “range” added once the main collection has sold. Jeannette Jamison turned the order around. The house designs its silhouettes for the full range from the very first sketch, from a 5 to a 15, and refuses the idea that a larger foot should settle for a plainer shoe. Style first, then access, and never one at the expense of the other.

“Feminine, structural, sensual. I don’t think any woman should have to give one of those up because of the number inside her shoe.”

Why a house, not a line

A line is a collection of products. A house is a point of view that outlives any single season. Jeannette built the latter on purpose: a consistent last, a recognisable toe, a heel pitch that is unmistakably hers, so that a woman who loves the Zo Pump this year will recognise its sister in the Noir Pump the next. The point of view is quiet. The shoes are not.

On proportion

She talks about proportion the way a tailor talks about a shoulder. It is the thing you notice without knowing why. Her insistence that every silhouette be patterned across all eleven sizes, rather than graded from one sample, is the most expensive decision the house makes and the one she is least willing to discuss changing. “If the shoe only looks right in the sample size,” she says, “we have made a photograph, not a shoe.”

What comes next

The first collection is fifteen silhouettes: pumps, slingbacks, boots, mules, sandals and a kitten heel, in a palette that runs from ivory and blush to sage, chocolate and noir. Each is reserved by email and confirmed personally by the studio, which is how Jeannette prefers it for now. “I want to know who is wearing them,” she says. “That is the part of this I would never hand to a machine.”