Why Manolo Blahnik Is Branching out from Shoes

By Ellie Pithers
Viva

A couple of days before I was due to interview Manolo Blahnik, a book thumped down on my desk. Manolo Blahnik: Fleeting Gestures and Obsessions is laughably titled, considering that, at 488 pages, it weighs more than a paving stone. A flick through reveals the usual glossy exemplars that people this genre of coffee-table tome — Kate Moss photographed by Corinne Day, Julie Christie by David Bailey, Bianca Jagger by Cecil Beaton — as well as lots of glorious pictures of Blahnik's beautiful shoes. Then there is a chapter about Mary Beard, classics professor at the University of Cambridge.

Beard, 60, is not known for her taste in stilettos, instead being revered for bringing an Everyman touch to her BBC programmes about the ancient world (and, subsequently, for her courage in speaking out against online trolls who criticised her “witchy” grey hair and un-made-up face). Her appearance, then, among hot pink satin mules trimmed with marabou feather and pompom-embellished court shoes, is unexpected.

More fool me. Manolo and Mary are firm friends, and have spent many happy hours together discussing the fact that there are more than 82 words in Greek for shoes. “She is my favourite woman in England!” yells Blahnik, when I get him on the phone one July afternoon. “She is a national treasure. Everything I love about England, encapsulated in one divine woman. All that incredible knowledge — oh! I can’t wait to come back so I can have lunch with her.”

Such eccentricities and forthright opinions — accompanied by a laugh that sounds like a singing kettle — make Blahnik a wonderful interviewee. Speaking from a creative bunker on an island somewhere off the coast of Africa, the 72-year-old scoffs when I ask if he is on holiday. “Holidays? Please. I don’t really like holidays, I like to do things all the time. I am working on the next collection. In London it’s terrible, every second someone is bothering me, wanting something - colour, leather, manufacturers, this, this, this. But here, I don’t have that many calls.” Except mine — the chief purpose of which is to discuss his new handbag collection, a first fully-fledged offering of clutches inspired by some of his most famous shoe designs, all goose-egg-sized, in jewel-toned satin with Swarovski crystal embellishment and on sale this month.

“People say it’s my first collection of bags but really I have been doing them for years, one every season or so,” Blahnik says, with a theatrical sigh. “This is the first time I’ve done six or seven. All those girls in their twenties and thirties who wear my shoes, they said to me, ‘We NEED bags’. Well, here they are. Maybe they won’t like them.” He blows a raspberry in self-retort.

Blahnik knows, of course, that the girls will like them. They've liked his designs since he began his shoe business in 1962 at the behest of American Vogue's then-editor Diana Vreeland, who saw his theatre and movie designs (he is mad about the movies) and encouraged him to switch to shoes. His first shop, a little buzz-for-admittance boutique in Old Church Street in London's Chelsea, attracted scores of loyal customers: Charlotte Rampling, Lauren Bacall, Bianca Jagger, and the Berenson sisters all dashed around in his flamboyant designs.

There was less of a dash at an Ossie Clark show, held at the Royal Court theatre in the early seventies, for which Blahnik had designed a rubber-crepe-soled shoe. “One thing I didn’t know is that the crepe is very soft and I didn’t put a piece of steel inside, so the shoes moved as the models walked,” he recalls. “All these divine girls, walking around, making a real effort not to fall. It was a horrible mistake but everybody loved it. At the end, Cecil Beaton said I had invented a new way of walking! I said, ‘Please, earth, eat me.’ Thank God I am still doing shoes.”

Of course he is — and thanks to Sex and the City, and its main character Carrie Bradshaw's $40,000 Manolo habit, he's become etched in the public consciousness as a byword for fabulous footwear. (It's ironic, incidentally, that while Blahnik's creations are always publicly referred to as "Manolos", he himself observes the quaint social more of referring to clients, including SATC's Sarah Jessica Parker, as "Miss".)

That byword has yet to be compromised: remarkably, Blahnik has held onto his name in the face of rampant luxury conglomerates buying up independent designers, and still designs every shoe himself. “You have to grow, otherwise you die, but I want it kept small,” he harrumphs, when I ask how he has successfully batted away stake-seeking corporations. “I just run away to the factories the whole time. And I am an absolute pain to everybody!” he roars.

His shoes are still must-haves. Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, is rarely seen in anything other than his nude slingbacks, and Alexandra Shulman, her British counterpart, pronounces the best perk of her job to be the custom-height stilettos he makes especially for her.

Celebrity patronage is largely one-sided; most modern beauties leave him cold. “I am very disappointed with people. The ones that I like, I like forever. But new generations are very boring for me. They don’t know anything about what I want to talk about” — that currently includes Balzac, whose work he is rereading in the original French.

He makes an exception for Uma Thurman, who debuted his clutch bag on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in May. “Uma is one of my favourite girls, one of the Isoldas of the world. I saw her the other day at some terrible party, I don’t go to parties often but I went to this one, and she looks good,” he says, in a conspiratorial tone, before wading off topic yet again. “I like to have lunches in London, not dinners, because I fall asleep. But not fashionable places - I went to that Fire place the other day, in Marylebone.” After further questioning, I discover he means The Chiltern Firehouse, a hotel so popular with A-listers that a commune of paparazzi now inhabits the pavement opposite. “I call it the Fire place because I have been there twice and both times I almost fainted! It’s so hot!”

He thinks he’ll be doing shoes till he drops. “I don’t like to travel so much. It’s exhausting, and I’m not a spring chicken any more. But the happiest moment in my nasty travels is the factory time. The true enjoyment of doing bags or shoes is talking to the artisans.”

He predicts, with characteristic charm, that it will be his boundless energy that “kills me in the end.”

He squeaks away happily. “But I cannot change!”

— The Daily Telegraph

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