MANOLO BLAHNIK

It would be a mistake to take the classic black stiletto for granted, because, as Manolo Blahnik observes, "these are the most difficult shoes to get right - you can't disguise them, which means they've got to be absolutely perfect". And he should know, having made them for everyone from Madonna (who famously declared his shoes to be "as good as sex") to Diana, Princess of Wales, who chose black grosgrain, high-heeled Manolos to wear the night her husband appeared on television to admit to his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. (Diana stole the show instead, drawing the photographers to her arrival at a party at the Serpentine gallery, where she walked tall once more, after years in flat pumps beside Prince Charles.)

You may blanch at the price of a pair of Manolos - £300 and rising fast - but it's hard not to admire their meticulous hand-made craftsmanship, as well as the history in their soles. Blahnik has been designing footwear since 1970, when he was introduced to Diana Vreeland, then editor of American Vogue. "Go make shoes," she said, having been impressed by his sketches. As he remarks: "It was like a commandment from God."

He still makes sure to include some classic black stilettos in every collection, "not cut too low, to reveal the toes - which I know is supposed to be fashionable these days, but I think is vile - and not so high that a woman can't walk properly. I think about 10 centimetres is the right height for the heel - much higher looks wrong, like a hooker - and not too pointy, but a beautiful, proper shape." He calls his version "pumps"; others label them "courts", but I think you'll know the right shape when you find them - not boring, just simply elegant.

As for the material, well, Manolo Blahnik always has fabulous pairs in black satin, as well as the more traditional leather or suede. And don't be afraid of embellishment: bows or corsages, jet beading or diamanté, or Christian Louboutin's marvellous signature red soles, which always gladden my heart on a grey wintry day. If you need further inspiration, it's worth clicking the heels on net-a-porter.com: even if you don't want to buy online (though it's hard to resist the site's regular special offers and sales), you can check out everything from Jimmy Choo to Miu Miu and Marni, before trailing round the shops in a pair of comfortable flats.

Unless, of course, you're a devotee like Sarah Jessica Parker, who wears her stilettos on-screen and off. "By now, I could run a marathon in a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels," she says. "I've destroyed my feet completely, but I don't care. What do you really need your feet for, anyway?"  - from "Hooked on Classics : black stilettos"   TELEGRAPH   9 Nov 2004

"I'm not a fetishist. I just love feet." Manolo Blahnik, shoe genius, opens up

10 prototypes every six months costing between  USD $2,400 and  $14,000 per pair

Manolo Blahnik claims he doesn't have a clue what people are talking about when they blithely toss his name around. To him, "Manolos" sounds like a tiny dive by the road where ageing matadors collect on a Saturday night to enjoy a little tapas while they review their career triumphs: "Let's go to Manolo's." To the rest of us, "Manolos" is, as Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, says in the catalogue that accompanies the Blahnik exhibition at London's Design Museum, "a synonym for fabulous footwear," and everything that fabulous footwear implies -- glamour, eroticism, obsession, a fantasy of female perfection that nestles temptingly, tauntingly out of reach.

Manolo Blahnik turned 60 in November. "I was never a professional beauty but I used to be kind of cute," he is sighs. "Now it's these two bulldog lines and the mouth .... It's not that I'm vain, but I don't like to see myself." Then there is the bad back, the result of a fall in his garden in 1995, which left him with two herniated discs. Oh, and there are the teeth, but that's genetic. Like his grandmother, Blahnik grinds. Her teeth eventually grew so thin that lemon juice would send her into transports of agony. Blahnik's current dental equivalent is an implant gone wrong. "It was ..." his voice trills. There is no need to say more.

In fact, the ellipses in Blahnik's speech invariably speak volumes, moments of loaded silence between cascades of words that rise and fall as he springs around the room. It's hardly the first time someone has asked this question, but how the Hell do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

And yet, contrary to the (sometimes-not-so) slow fade that fashion favours for its elder statesmen, Blahnik is more present than ever. "I'm not at all worried about getting older," he cries defiantly. I suggest this might have something to do with no longer feeling like he has anything to prove.

"No, I'm more insecure now, but at the same time, my mind is totally curious and adolescent, maybe a bit retarded -- you never know -- I really am ...." Suddenly he thumps the table hard enough for our teacups to jump.

"I just want to know what's going on!" What's going on is something Blahnik has always known, from the moment he arrived in London in the late '60s and edged himself effortlessly into the beau monde.

He began designing shoes in 1971 and was almost immediately successful. Then he defined male elegance for a generation when he was famously depicted by David Bailey for Vogue, languishing with Angelica Huston in a room at the Hotel Negresco in Nice. Around the same time, he posed poolside in Bel-Air for a Bryan Ferry album cover. Such extra-curricular antics did little to impede his acquisition of a lengthy retinue of stars who wouldn't leave home without Manolo (in shoe form, at least). And now there's the new generation of hip hop fashion addicts for whom he represents an instant passport to class and credibility.

Age clearly agrees with him -- sort of. "I thought I was going to be much more ... kind of relaxed. Are you kidding? I'm getting triple, more neurotic. I'm a hyper person. I've always been hyperactive." His fingers snap furiously for emphasis. "People get very happy and contented in what they do, but I could not be that, not ever. Maybe one season is bad or one season is anonymous, but I don't feel I'm going to fade. On the contrary, I just have to edit myself more." He concedes his hyperactivity is an asset in a business as peripatetic as fashion. "But I've never considered myself to be in fashion. I just do bloody shoes."

Leonardo da Vinci described the feet as masterpieces of engineering and works of art. Perhaps it's this elevated combination of technical and aesthetic considerations that accounts for the shoemaker's reputation throughout history. As far as the applied arts go, the cobbler is akin to the architect. Indeed, Blahnik considers himself an architect manqué. An artist? He would say not, despite the masterful portraits he paints of each shoe as he works on a collection. I'm contemplating the winsome extravagance of Hedonia, a style for spring -- woven carnival-striped silk, long trailing ribbons and an instep trimmed with red Venetian glass beads -- and he is saying, "I was born like that. I mean my art, whatever it is, my technique, what do you call it? It's an entertainment for myself. I don't think it's art, it's just an artisan thing. If you don't have a shoe that's functional, what use is it?" But that hardly explains Hedonia, or, my other favourite, Perfidia." ("Per-fee-dee-a"' Blahnik says caressingly.)

Fashion has often found itself in thrall to the dreams of small-town boys who spend their childhoods saturated in fantasies of big-city glamour and sophistication. Bill Blass was one. So was Cristóbal Balenciaga. And Manolo Blahnik, born to a Spanish mother and Czechoslovakian father in the Canary Islands, is another. "I am a child of the movies," he says. "I was brought up on an island, and you didn't have TV down there in the '50s. There were a few English people -- Winston Churchill, Christopher Isherwood -- and volcanoes, bananas, and movies were the only visual thing I had. I was there waiting for the teachers to come and give us the lessons so I could get to that 5:30 screening at the cinema. It was like a gospel for me, like a church. How could I deny that that was the seed of my creativity?'

The movies helped Blahnik understand distance, separation, the space between dreams and reality. "You don't have to be born in New York or Paris -- you either have it or you don't," he declares. So it makes perfect sense to assume the movie house in Santa Cruz de La Palma is also where he got his education in human nature. Think of each of his collections as a drama in which every shoe plays a distinct role -- 150 different pairs of shoes, definitely an epic production -- and you'll get a pretty good sense of what I mean. I suggest to him that, when a woman puts on her Manolos she is being given a licence to assume the character of the shoe. The idea appeals to him. As the issuer of these licences, he wonders whether it extends to him as well, whether his cutting and pasting of every sample, his sculpting of every heel, liberates something inside himself. "If I wasn't doing shoes, I'd be sculpting things, big buildings, a stonemason ... carving. It's the only thing I'm really happy about."

As it is for any true artisan, it's the journey that matters for Blahnik, not the destination. "The happiness of mine is those four months I spend in the factory. I don't even know where I am when I'm in the factory. I'm totally out of it, naturally. I'm not of that kind of school which is, 'Oh, I'm going to send you the collection of Pappagallo 1961, you interpret it, just change the buckles.' This is what these kiddies today do. They just buy archives. You know something? I cannot do that. This is almost making love with corpses. What do you call it? Necrophilia. The most I can do for inspiration is a museum."

There is a distinct edge of relief in his voice when Blahnik claims his new collection has nothing to do with the present. It's inspired by a vision of the Empress Josephine in Guadaloupe. She and the Queen of Naples and Elizabeth of Austria are his spirit guides. "The ghosts of all those women come back to me and say so much because the rigour and the style of those women you cannot take out of your system." It's no Proustian reverie, though. Blahnik is much too wayward for that. "I belong to the school of getting inspired by the past but then ... I want something that's now.... I'm going to show you something I adore." He dashes out of the room, returning breathlessly, moments later, with a shoe from 1989 that is nothing more than an aluminum sole with plastic ribbons to wrap the ankle.

"I love engineered things like that. One of my purest," he sighs. "But it was not very practical.

"I could have made it work, but I would spoil the purity. Can you imagine Empress Elizabeth in the 18th century with a metal shoe? I love these kinds of contradictions, these kinds of fights."

Blahnik hauls out another challenging proposition, a shoe that hovers heel-less in mid-air. "The Latin girls," he says dreamily, "not Carmen Miranda, but Celia Cruz, the '40s divas walking in these heel-less shoes. You see the heel?" he exhorts, and it's true, I do, like a vestigial limb. "Finally, the focal point is not the bloody heel, it's the curve." His voice steadily rises in a transport of ecstasy. "I think it's sexy...." Then back to earth. "We sold maybe 10 pairs." Even further back to earth. "I should push the product." Then a note of hope. "But always, two years later, somebody says, 'Do you have it?' and I say, 'It's too late now.' "

He said it, the magic word. Sexy. In recent years, Blahnik has been noticeably touchy about the subject of sex. Apparently, nothing has changed. "I'm sick of it, totally, absolutely, not interested, never was, I don't even think of it, I've totally abolished it." This is, of course, the man who creates objects of such surpassing, obsessive beauty that they practically demand to be fetishized. Men buy Manolos, you know, not to wear, just to possess. "Obsessions? I don't get it. I don't even know what fetish is. Yes, yes, I do know what fetish is. I've been seeing Buñuel movies all my life." And yet he must surely see that his own life is proof enough of the fascinating power of the foot and, by extension, the shoe. Picture little Manolito on the beach. It's not hard -- there is a photograph in the Design Museum's catalogue of him as a child, naked but for the shoe he clutches. "With the other little boys and girls, I didn't even look at their faces, I looked at their feet. But I'm not a fetishist," he insists. "I just love the feet. I don't know, they're very expressive."

But even Blahnik has to admit the intimacy of what he does is extraordinary. "This is the communication that I have with people, maybe," he muses. "Maybe the act itself is the bloody shoes. I guess so, unconsciously." And nowhere is this more apparent than in the personal appearances he makes in department stores across America, the semi-legendary love-ins where women come to have their shoes signed and their feet touched by the master. He used to be shocked by the things his customers would tell him. Now it's the men, not the women, who surprise him. In Washington last year, one husband told him, "I don't know whether to kiss you or hit you." His wife's Manolo habit was breaking him, but he had almost succeeded in getting her to wear her Manolos in the bedroom. "The husbands say to me, 'Oh, you really have ruined my life, but at the same time you have given me something else, which is desire,' and I say, what?" His voice soars again, mingling horror with glee.

If his combination of ingenuousness and worldliness is proving engaging on a glum day in his King's Road showroom, I can only wonder at how seductively it must play in California or Texas. And isn't seduction what his shoes are all about? "No, I don't see it as seduction, I see it as transformation. I always think of shoes as a theatrical gesture." And there are few gestures more theatrical than a towering Blahnik heel. It's just like he says: "The high ones imply a different walk, you have to concentrate on your balance, you move differently, you transform yourself in seconds when you put a high heel on." But Blahnik offers surprising consolation for all those women who find the air too thin atop a heel. "A flat shoe is even more difficult -- it's the most sensuous thing in the world. Think about Bardot in And God Created Woman, Hepburn in Sabrina."

That's all well and good, but the fact remains that heels are what women want from Blahnik. Sarah Jessica Parker, a Manolo addict both in real life and in her role in Sex and the City, once memorably observed something to the effect that God had given her stupid legs so she could wear his shoes. The delicate balance he masters with his heels -- elongating the leg, straightening the spine -- is something so rare in his business that it implies a familiarity with his métier that may be ... well, a little perverse. Does he road-test his creations? "No, it's torture. I went once with Peter Schlesinger and David Hockney to a party at Porchester Hall [in west London], and people were dressing up and they told me to wear a suit and high heels and it was hell for me."

And yet his shoes suggest a supernatural sensitivity to what women want. What could possibly account for it? "I think it's got to do with that aura of the not possible to obtain. How do you say the word? Out of reach.... It's not a fantasy, that's beyond out of reach. Unapproachable, that's the word. I love that, it's almost like you adore a woman."

Manolo Blahnik isn't the first man to put women on a pedestal, but the feminine ideal becomes something different in his hands (and it is by his hands that the essential difference is formed). "It's not that women are literally unapproachable for me, it's the idea of me seeing such a phenomenon which I don't have. But me, I am totally there with them, wearing the shoes.

"I don't think of myself as a man, a woman, I don't care about boundaries, there shouldn't be boundaries." There's a very agreeable word for this, Manolo. It's empathy. And, in the hothouse world of fashionable footwear, it is the signature of a unique legacy.

"Phhhfftt!" Manolo issues a dismissive snort.

"A very short legacy. I'll only be remembered for giving a woman five seconds of happiness...." Ah, but what bliss!   - Tim Blanks   Saturday Post    15 Feb 2003 

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