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“It’s great for French culture that Sarkozy’s watching Visconti and Fellini!”

Inès’s office at Vivier is as cosmopolitan as her career. There’s a framed photograph of Churchill (“I just like him”), a marble sculpture of a Vivier shoe, a battered Hermès Kelly bag and vivid, ointment-pink walls. It’s impossible to pigeonhole her style: her Paris home, a flat near the Luxembourg gardens, is minimalist and modern, but her holiday cottage in Normandy is busy and colourful, with decor inspired by the Bloomsbury set. She now shares both with her daughters, Nine, 15, and Violette, 9; her husband, Italian businessman Luigi d’Urso, died of a heart attack 2 years ago at the age of only 52.

“If it’s messy at home and there are children and Coca-Cola bottles everywhere, there’s no point in screaming,” she reasons, “because it’s the life I wanted. In a few years I’m going to be alone in a perfectly clean place with no mess, waiting for the children to call me.”

In little more than five years, her taste, Della Valle’s money and Bruno Frisoni’s designs have taken the name Roger Vivier from the history books to the high street. There are now Roger Vivier shops in London and Hong Kong, and flagship stores in Paris, New York and Milan. Frisoni’s buckled classics and bubblegum patent numbers tread the red carpet on the feet of Scarlett Johansson, Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman. Mere mortals talk about Viviers in the same breath as Manolos and Choos. With their iconic outsize buckle, Viviers are statement accessories for the feet, beloved of chic metropolitan women.

In Paris, the shop and offices sprawl over three floors. Inès imported the idea of a first-floor showroom, contrary to all the usual retail articles of faith, because she felt it created the feel of a couture house.

“If I’d gone to the bank,” she laughs, “and said, ‘I want to open a huge shop selling beautiful shoes, right in front of Hermès, in the most expensive place in Paris, and I need a Picasso to put in the shop,’ they’d have said, ‘Go away!’ ”

It helped that the man who taught her much of what she knows about fashion was Karl Lagerfeld, whom she describes as “the best teacher. You learn things without even knowing how.” The pair fell out spectacularly when Inès agreed to pose as Marianne, the symbol of France, a move Lagerfeld condemned as bourgeois. To add insult to injury, when she left, she took Lagerfeld’s personal assistant with her. They’ve patched things up since, “but we aren’t very close friends like we used to be. I don’t know if he has very close friends.”

Dressed today in an Aspesi jacket, Notify jeans, a Chloé shirt and pancake-flat Viviers, Inès looks as chic and pulled-together as someone with an army of stylists to dress her every morning. The reality is that like any other working mother, it’s a mad rush of getting her daughters ready for school, getting herself ready, not knowing what to wear…

“It’s impossible to find a balance,” she says. “Impossible to be the perfect housewife or the perfect mother. Look at my office: it’s a mess! The number one priority has to be yourself. Two years ago I would have told you it was the children, but the children are happy if you’re happy. The good thing about age is that you know what you’re good at.”

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