Sarah Jessica Parker puts heart and sole into shoe designs

As the former star of Sex and the City and a New Yorker, Sarah Jessica Parker knows about shoes.

Sarah Jessica Parker at David Jones in Sydney on Sunday where she signed some of her shoes for clients. Picture: Nikki Short

On the TV show Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw’s adoration of high heels turned Spanish designer Manolo Blahnik into a household name.

Now the American star who played Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker, is hoping some of that marketing magic will rub off on her own shoe line, SJP.

The 54-year-old was in Sydney on Sunday for a shoe signing at David Jones, and while the queue to meet the style icon stretched across the store’s seventh floor, she sees her role as less Bradshaw and more businesswoman.

“I’m a business owner who works really, really, really hard,” Parker told The Australian.

“I think that Carrie had a ­fevered, impressive, very compelling ­relationship with fashion. I’m working on a company that believes in that, but I wouldn’t try to compete with her.”

She explained that unlike some clothing lines endorsed with a ­celebrity’s name, she had maintained a hands-on role in the production of her shoes — which are handmade in Italy and sell from between $350 and $650 — and sees her approach as “listening to what women need”.

“I’m really paying attention, which is why I’m in the stores all the time,” she said. “I’m listening to what women want. I’m a New Yorker. I ride subways, I take cabs, I’m dropping kids off and running from meeting to meeting.

“We don’t follow trends … and have never followed a trend. It’s just been something that I ­always felt wasn’t going to be helpful to me.

“We work incredibly hard on the interior comfort of our shoes, which is a physics issue because of volume.

“The more you make comfort, the more you lose the volume and you can get off your sizing.”

Parker also believes growing numbers of female shoe designers will work to kill off the reputation many high-heeled shoes have of being uncomfortable.

“There’s a really nice amount of women designing shoes and I think more and more are having really nice success,” she said.

“But it’s just been male-­dominated for a long time, as have many industries.

“The care of attention to design, in production and the technical side, all of it is being looked at differently (by women designers). We’re simply going to see more women doing it.”