Sandra Choi Spent Three Decades Building Jimmy Choo, Now She’s the One Being Honored

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On November 30, Sandra Choi will collect the Special Recognition Award at the Royal Albert Hall, marking thirty years since she first picked up a last in her uncle’s East End workshop.

The British Fashion Council has announced that Sandra Choi will receive a Special Recognition Award at The Fashion Awards 2026, set for November 30 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The honor is built around a single, simple fact: Choi has led the creative direction of Jimmy Choo since the label’s founding in 1996, making her one of the longest serving creative directors working in fashion today.

 

Recent editions of The Fashion Awards have drawn crowds of roughly 4,000 guests into the Royal Albert Hall’s Victorian dome, a mix of industry insiders, red carpet regulars, and members of the public who buy tickets to watch the show unfold live rather than read about it the next morning. Choi’s award will be handed out inside that same room, not a smaller side event tucked around the main ceremony.

The BFC’s citation leans on the same idea twice: that Choi has managed to hold creative direction and commercial performance together for three decades, keeping Jimmy Choo among Britain’s most influential luxury houses rather than letting it calcify into a single decade’s idea of itself. The council also pointed to work that happens away from the design table, describing her as an advocate for craftsmanship and emerging talent who has mentored others and represented British fashion abroad.

“I am truly honoured to receive this recognition from the British Fashion Council,” Choi said, in a statement carried by FashionUnited. She went on to credit the people she has worked alongside rather than dwelling on the milestone itself, framing the award as recognition for a team rather than a single designer.

Laura Weir, chief executive of the BFC, said in comments reported by TheIndustry.fashion that “Sandra Choi is one of fashion’s most respected creative leaders,” adding that her vision has shaped Jimmy Choo into an enduring global brand.

The Special Recognition Award sits alongside a competitive slate this year that includes Sarah Burton and Simone Rocha, both shortlisted twice, and a Designer of the Year field with Anthony Vaccarello, Haider Ackermann, Matthieu Blazy, Michael Rider, and the Olsen twins for The Row. Proceeds from the ceremony fund the BFC’s education and mentoring work, and this year’s edition returns with Pandora as presenting partner, alongside Johnnie Walker and The Peninsula London as official partners.

It sits within a small category of honorary prizes the BFC hands out alongside its competitively judged awards, reserved for contributions the council judges too significant to leave to a public or industry vote. Recent recipients have included cultural figures well outside conventional design roles, among them Jefferson Hack, honored in 2023 for cultural preservation. Choi’s own history with the ceremony predates this particular award: Jimmy Choo won the competitively judged Designer Brand of the Year outright back in 2008, meaning the label has now been recognized by the BFC on both sides of the ledger, for a single standout year and for three decades of steady output.

transition

Choi’s version of the story does not start with a design degree or a runway debut. It starts on the Isle of Wight, where she was born, and continues in Hong Kong, where she spent several years living with her grandparents before returning to the UK as a teenager to finish school. Once back in London, she went to work with her uncle, Jimmy Choo, then a couture shoemaker operating out of a former hospital building in London’s East End, making bespoke shoes for a clientele that already included Princess Diana. Choo had shown his own collection at London Fashion Week as early as 1988, the same year British Vogue gave his handmade shoes an eight page feature, so by the time Choi arrived as an apprentice the workshop already carried a reputation well beyond its East End postcode.

She enrolled at Central Saint Martins to study fashion design while continuing to work at her uncle’s side, learning to cut patterns, stitch, fit, and construct lasts. The apprenticeship won. Choi eventually left her studies to focus on the couture atelier full time, and by her own account and that of contemporaneous profiles, she was running its day to day design and management by 1993, a role she held until 1996.

That year, the business restructured into a standalone company, and Choi became its creative director, working alongside Tamara Mellon, then a Vogue accessories editor who came on as the brand’s co-founder and public face. Their first store opened on Motcomb Street in London’s Belgravia neighborhood, a short walk from the department stores that had been carrying the label’s early stock.

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Expansion followed quickly by luxury standards. A New York store opened in 1998, a Los Angeles store in 1999, and Choi began working directly with Hollywood stylists out of a hotel atelier ahead of major awards shows, dressing feet that would later carry the label onto red carpets occupied by Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, and Natalie Portman.

No single culture moment did more for the brand’s visible than television. Sex and the City put Jimmy Choo’s leopard print Leo sandal in its opening title sequence and dressed Carrie Bradshaw in a pair of lilac suede, feather trimmed heels for an episode built around a stolen shoe, a plot point that produced the line “I lost my Choo!” and, by most industry accounts, did as much to introduce the brand to a mainstream American audience as any campaign the company could have bought outright. Both styles were revived in 2025 as part of an eight piece archival capsule Choi curated ahead of the brand’s 30th anniversary, alongside designer Conner Ives and fashion journalist Alexander Fury.

The accolades that followed in the 2000s were institutional rather than cultural: 2008 brought Designer Brand of the Year from the BFC, ACE Brand of the Year from the Accessory Council, and Brand of the Year from Footwear News in New York, three separate industry bodies effectively agreeing on the same point at the same time.

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Choi’s standing inside the industry rests on more than tenure alone. In 2019, she was inducted into the Footwear News Hall of Fame, an honor generally reserved for designers judged to have reshaped their category rather than simply worked within it. The following year brought a different kind of project: a four style capsule co-designed with Kaia Gerber, then the face of Jimmy Choo’s spring 2020 campaign, built around the combat style Cruz boot that Gerber had already made her own off the runway. Fifteen percent of the collection’s sales went to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a cause Gerber chose herself. Choi described Gerber at the time as the label’s muse for a new generation, someone whose off duty style had become as recognizable as anything the brand had put on a red carpet.

More recently, Choi has pushed the brand into territory further from a shoebox than anything in its first two decades. In 2024, she unveiled Jimmy Choo’s first ever art commission, a large scale installation in Dubai by Emirati artist Shaikha Al Mazrou titled Symmetrical Repeats, and used the unveiling to talk about craftsmanship in terms that had nothing to do with heel height. It is a small example of a pattern that runs through her career: treat the shoe as the anchor, and let everything else, stores, campaigns, causes, and now commissions, expand outward from there.

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Behind the red carpet, the company changed hands more than once. A series of private equity transactions moved through the 2000s and early 2010s, and Jimmy Choo himself departed the business in 2001, followed eventually by Mellon, leaving Choi as the only constant creative presence at the company that carried her uncle’s name. The brand went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2014, and in 2017 it was acquired by Michael Kors Holdings in a deal widely reported at roughly 1.2 billion dollars. Michael Kors Holdings later renamed itself Capri Holdings after acquiring Versace, and Jimmy Choo has operated as part of that group, listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CPRI, ever since.

Choi’s own title kept pace with the company’s growth. She was named sole creative director in 2013, telling The Daily Telegraph, “It’s time to give this place a shake,” a nod to pushing the label past its reputation as a single kind of high heel. Under her direction, the product range expanded well past footwear into handbags, men’s shoes, fragrance, jewelry, and eyewear, and the company now operates more than 200 boutiques worldwide. She currently helms the brand’s creative side alongside chief executive Hannah Colman, who joined Jimmy Choo the same year Choi did, as a store manager on Motcomb Street, before rising to the top job in 2020. Capri Holdings chairman and chief executive John Idol has said he expects Jimmy Choo to grow into an 800 million dollar business in the years ahead. Public company data puts the label’s most recently reported annual revenue at roughly 618 million dollars, which makes Idol’s target ambitious without being far fetched, a gap of a little under a third rather than a doubling.

[PLACEHOLDER: Portrait of Sandra Choi OBE. Jimmy Choo’s own site credits its current official portrait of Choi to photographer Chris Floyd; source a licensed reproduction directly from Jimmy Choo’s press office rather than substituting a stock image.]

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The Special Recognition Award caps a year that already handed Choi one of the country’s more formal honors. In June 2026, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the King’s Birthday Honours list for services to the fashion industry, part of a cohort that also included Charlotte Tilbury, Kurt Geiger chief executive Neil Clifford, and Me+Em founder Clare Hornby. At the time, Choi framed the OBE the way she has framed most milestones in her career: as recognition of everyone who had brought their creativity and effort to Jimmy Choo over three decades, not just her own.

Choi has had to correct the record on that framing more than once. In interviews, she has pushed back on being described as a nepo baby, and has said plainly that the family tie to her uncle’s name matters less today than the teams and networks the company now runs on globally, even as she credits him with teaching her the technical foundations, cutting patterns, fitting lasts, that she still relies on. She is married to Tamburlaine Gorst, and spends noticeably more interview time these days being asked about her own decisions than about her uncle’s.

That instinct, crediting the room rather than the name above the door, runs through the archival project she curated in 2025 ahead of the brand’s 30th anniversary, a curated edit of eight styles from the label’s first five years, including the Sex and the City sandals. Choi described the exercise as an opportunity to see Jimmy Choo through other people’s eyes, and called the resulting collection a reflection of the brand’s roots rather than a retrospective for its own sake.

None of it changes what happens at the Royal Albert Hall on November 30: a shoemaker’s niece who abandoned a design degree to finish an apprenticeship will walk up to collect an award for turning that apprenticeship into one of British fashion’s longest running creative tenures.