On weekends he hitchhiked to Atlantic Beach on the South Shore, where he sneaked into private clubs. MADDEN GREW UP in the Five Towns section of Long Island, the youngest of three boys whose father was in the textile business. “For our market,” he said, “we are Christian Louboutin.” Madden paused, defiant, blue eyes flashing. “I’m not in the CFDA, but Puff Daddy is,” he said. He said his peers in the Council of Fashion Designers of America do not acknowledge him. But we are, for the most part, creating new shoes every day, and they don’t get it.” “Are we influenced by Christian Louboutin? Of course we are. “We get no credit from the design community,” Mr. It also irks him that fashion’s elite snub him as a creator of knockoffs. It’s really frustrating for me to see that.” You would think that one of them would cop to being influenced by Steve Madden. “And I know they all grew up on my shoes. “I saw a thing, I think in The New York Post, about the top 10 style chicks that are 20 years old, and none of them mentioned my name,” Mr. A longtime bachelor, he is now married to one of his former office managers and has 5-year-old twins and a baby on the way. “But it’s not easy.”) And rich: he said he is paid too much, earning $5.41 million in 2012 and granted $80 million in restricted stock. (“I can’t drink and drug safely, so I choose not to now,” he said. “They have no recollection at all,” said Marshal Cohen, the chief retail analyst at the NPD Group, the consumer research company. But his past does not seem to bother his forever-young customer base. Madden shares in initial public offerings that he traded illegally. Madden’s transgressions will be immortalized in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a movie directed by Martin Scorsese about Stratton Oakmont, the investment firm that gave Mr. He also hired Kari Sigerson, who, along with Miranda Morrison, was fired in 2011 from the company the women founded. Madden has forged relationships with the Italian sneaker maker Superga, as well as with celebrity designers like Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. In 2010, the company saved Betsey Johnson, buying the brand for $27.5 million, a bargain after her company was forced into bankruptcy (in an interview, she called him “Stevie Wonder”). And over the last few years the company has prospered through acquisitions, strategic partnerships and some nurturing of orphaned designers. Rosenfeld said there was never any question of his not returning - indeed, it became a selling point in ads. Madden, 55, seems more central to the brand than ever. He is now creative and design chief of the shoe empire he founded in 1990, having ceded the chief executive title to Ed Rosenfeld, a former investment banker at Peter J. Madden was famously sentenced to 41 months in prison for stock fraud (he served two and a half years) after a flameout fueled by drugs, alcohol and his love of money. “I deal with this a lot,” he said.Ĭollaboration can be tough, sure - but it beats sharing a jail cell, wondering if you can ever rebuild the life you’ve left behind. We’re making it.’ But then I think to myself, we work together.” “But my team is fighting me to keep it the way it is. “I want this shoe to be on this bottom,” he said, pressing the beige sole into the black top. One crisp morning last month, the shoe titan Steve Madden was ruminating over two sandals laid out on his desk in his factory in Long Island City, Queens: one black with a thin sole the other creamy beige, its heel thick as sliced bread.
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