Terry de Havilland: exhibition celebrates late shoe designer

‘Rock n Roll Cobbler’ Terry de Havilland, who died in 2019, is celebrated in ‘Icons of British Fashion’ at Blenheim Palace (photo: Gordon Hawtin)

TERRY DE HAVILLAND: EXHIBITION CELEBRATES LATE SHOE DESIGNER

Terry de Havilland, the designer whose iconic shoe and boot creations straddled the worlds of haut couture, high street fashion and fetish/goth fantasy, will be celebrated in an exhibition opening at Blenheim Palace later this month.

From March 23 to June 30, the ancestral home of Winston Churchill (in Woodstock, a few miles north of Oxford) will host Icons of British Fashion, an exhibition featuring a line-up of world-class British designers and labels. And there will be two Terry de Havilland exhibits at the event. One is by the Newcastle company that acquired the rights to trade under the Terry de Havilland name, and currently sells its Spanish-manufactured footwear range online.

Terry de Havilland (photo: Emma Summerton) and, right, Liz de Havilland. Photographer Gordon Hawtin titled his shot of Liz ‘She who must be obeyed’

The other exhibit is by the Estate of Terry De Havilland, owned by Terry’s widow and business partner Liz de Havilland (with no connection to the Newcastle business). The Estate’s exhibit will focus on the peak years of Terry’s fetish work in the 1990s, covering the Magic Shoe Company era — remember those fabulous Dredd/Smeg gladiator-style boots? — and the legendary Transmuters so beloved of kinksters and goths.

At Blenheim, each space along the visitor route in the 300-year-old Palace will pay homage to a British fashion icon, starting in the Great Hall with designs on display by the late Dame Vivienne Westwood and her creative partner Andreas Kronthaler. The other brands represented at Blenheim are Barbour, Bruce Oldfield, Jean Muir, Lulu Guinness, Stella McCartney, Stephen Jones Millinery for Christian Dior, Temperley London, Turnbull & Asser and Zandra Rhodes.

Two Terry de Havilland ankle-boot styles favoured by legendary punk pioneer Viv Albertine, guitarist with The Slits

So while it would be silly to pretend this is a fetish-first event, there will definitely be some content to titillate kinkster sensibilities — especially in Liz de Havilland’s exhibit. Promised are some great designs from the 1990s/Magic Shoe era (which Liz says were “the best of times” for her and Terry), including images from such celebrated scene photographers as Doralba Picerno and Jeremy Chaplin. We remember that it sometimes felt, in London in those magical ’90s, as if almost everyone you bumped into at a Rubber Ball or a Torture Garden night was shod by TdH!

Terry de Havilland, born Terence Higgins on March 21, 1938, came from a family of bespoke cobblers in east London. He’d been working for his father when, as the 1970s approached — and with the assistance of some of his dad’s old shoe lasts for 1940s platform-soled, wedge and stack-heeled shoes — Terry turned one of his footwear fantasies into some snakeskin samples for a Kensington Market retailer. The styles sold so well that the Higgins family factory could hardly keep up with demand.

Pure gold! Some of Terry de Havilland’s more exotically decorative creations (photo: Gordon Hawtin)

In 1972, with the amusing irreverence that would become a refreshing trademark, Terry set up his first shop, Cobblers to the World, on Chelsea’s King Road. As writer Veronica Horwell notes in her Guardian obituary, the shop became “party central for stylists, models, rock starts wives and ex-wives”. The obit states that Angie Bowie was Terry’s live-in girlfriend for a while, although Liz de Havilland maintains that while Angie Bowie and Terry did have a “rampant affair”, it was actually Angie Burdon, ex-wife of Eric Burdon, who lived with Terry, and had a son, Caesar, by him.

Celebrity customers included everyone from Rudolf Nureyev to Jackie O; from David Bowie and Marc Bolan to Tim Curry’s Rocky Horror Show alter ego Frank-N-Furter. During the 1970s, Terry’s classic women’s three-tier wedges were bought by some 200,000 “ordinary” women customers. But the arrival of punk in the latter part of the ’70s eventually changed footwear fashions sufficiently to render Cobblers to the World surplus to requirements, and it closed at the end of the decade. Even so, Terry continued to be a purveyor of height-enhancing party shoes to the stars for years afterwards.

Liz describes the styles above as “from the ‘forgotten years’ when Terry had so much fun, free from the confines of the ‘business’ of fashion”

Later ventures included Kamikaze Shoes (for stilettos and goth boots) and the aforementioned Magic Shoe Co. After Magic came a shop in Camden Stables Market, with Terry continuing to produce and sell new ranges. He did this, Horwell reminds us, “both directly and through licensing, inventively reworking his artworks ‘between the fierce and the gorgeous’. From his Dalston studio, she adds, he also crafted couture pairs, for example sending Kate Moss on her honeymoon “with ‘fuck me’ and ‘fuck you’ spelled out in crystal on her platform soles”.

Those of us who knew Terry at his pervy peak remember him as a wonderfully warm and generous character who loved being around fetish folk, with their enthusiasm for kink culture and his contributions to it. Like many of the most talented creatives we’ve known, he was an artist first; the business side was not so much his forté — he did once say that for him, it was “all about the sex”.

Screenshot showing Terry and Liz outside Harvey Nicks, from the 2003 TV documentary ‘Trouble at the Top – Terry de Havilland’

The business side improved considerably once he and Liz got together, but the couple’s business ups and downs remained sufficiently turbulent for a television documentary to feature them in 2003. Made for the BBC’s Trouble At The Top strand, it can currently be viewed on YouTube where it’s split into four segments of approximately nine minutes each (links below). For a briefer (3.5mins) but definitely affectionate snapshot of Terry and Liz’s world, we also recommend Terry de Havilland – A short film about legendary ‘Rock n Roll cobbler’ by Artfurr (2012 — link below).

If you fancy a day out at the Icons of British Fashion exhibition at Blenheim Palace (link below), entry is included with Blenheim’s Annual or Privilege Pass, or with a Palace Park and Gardens Day Ticket. Purchasable in advance, the Day Ticket (which includes a free Annual Pass) costs £38 per adult, £22 per child (free for children under three), or £99 for a family of two adults and two children.

Blenheim Palace, ancestral home of Winston Churchill, hosts Icons of British Fashion’ from March 23 to June 30 this year