Meghan Markle’s favourite stiletto might be Manolo Blahnik’s sexy “Brigitte Bardot” pump, but the designer says he is not involved in any royal wedding plans. “And I’m too, too busy anyway,” Blahnik says by phone from London, before heading to Geneva to open a new boutique.
His next stop will be Toronto, for a lunch with clients at Holt Renfrew and the opening of Manolo Blahnik: The Art of Shoes on May 16 at the city’s Bata Shoe Museum. This is the only North America stop for the exhibition that has already touched down in Milan, Madrid, Prague and St. Petersburg. Guest curator Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz has selected 200 styles from the designer’s own archive of more than 30,000 along with Blahnik’s flamboyant drawings, each a work of art in its own right.
Shoe designer Manolo Blahnik.no credit
Influences ranging from Catherine the Great to Frank Lloyd Wright are woven throughout the exhibit, not surprising given that Blahnik’s knowledge of art and history are museum-curator level. As a teenager, he studied the feet of Greek statues with the same dedication others his age soaked up soccer stats. In his 20s, while living in Paris, he paid daily visits to the Musée Carnavalet, which is devoted to documenting the city’s past. “I really love history,” says the designer, who splits his time between London and the southwestern English city of Bath, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “One of my biggest luxuries is to open my window and see everything as it was in the 18th century. I live in the present, and nostalgic I’m not. But I do have incredible respect for what’s been left to us.”
Blahnik credits his mother’s habit of reading him classical poetry and literature from the time he was a baby with instilling his love of history. “I was hyperactive, even in my sleep. I was a painful person to be with. My sister would fall asleep immediately, but I wanted more and more and more. So I grew up with Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit. I’m anglified to the point of neuroticism. I love Anglo-Saxon poets, culture – everything.”
Blahnik’s mother was also mad about fashion, though the family lived on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands with no TV, tourism or neighbours. Fashion magazines arrived by boat and his mother, with the help of a cobbler, made her own shoes during the war. The isolation meant that young Blahnik had a rich imaginary life, inventing games, dressing his dog and pet monkey, Diaghilev and Nijinsky, and making footwear for lizards out of Cadbury chocolate wrappers.
Years later, when he showed sketches of his costumes and set designs to legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, she proclaimed, “Do shoes.” The first pairs Blahnik designed for British designer Ossie Clark’s spring 1971 collection were literally unwearable, with the models wobbling up and down the runway because he didn’t realize the rubber heels needed a metal rod for support.
“At the same time, people loved it,” he squeals with delight, even though almost 50 years have passed. “People like Cecil Beaton and David Hockney were there and said, ‘You invented a new way of walking.’” Many would have given up right then, but Blahnik became determined to get things right.
He has since become a household name, thanks to many mentions on the HBO series Sex and the City. In Michael Roberts’s documentary Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards, Vogue editor Anna Wintour admits, “I can’t remember the last time I wore anybody else’s shoes. I just don’t even look at them.” In 2007, the Queen named him honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Blahnik has also achieved something every designer wants to but few do. He’s created a classic, several in fact, including the Hangisi, an elegant pump with a crystal buckle on the toe. “We’ve sold thousands and thousands and it’s still going very strong, especially in China,” Blahnik says, citing mid-19th century courtesans, Boldini paintings and couturiers Poiret and Worth as inspiration. That’s typical of his artistic process, where a melding of influences bubbles up from his subconscious and onto his sketch pad.
Not all his designs spring from such lofty cultural heights, though. Blahnik’s earliest pumps came from an idea to take a traditional porn-star shoe and turn it into something elegant. Rubber fishing waders were the starting point for the hip-high satin boots he did in collaboration with Vetements. Rihanna famously wore an orange pair at OVO Fest in Toronto in 2016 and he has done four collections with the singer, whom he calls “a very creative girl.”
Many designers, as their success grows, become figureheads in their companies and hand duties over to a team. But Blahnik remains completely hands-on in his factory outside Milan, right down to carving the lasts and shaping the heels. “Explaining things to people is very irritating to me,” he admits. “I am not a good delegator.” Nor does he have patience for anyone lacking attention to detail, griping about the “last minute” attitude of the engineers and designers creating his new Geneva boutique. “Sometimes it makes me cry because most people don’t care about quality. I don’t belong to that kind of society that is quick, where people consume and throw away.” Blahnik’s standards are more in line with a time when churches and museums took centuries to build.
At 75, Blahnik shows no sign of slowing down, though two cracked vertebrae in a fall two years ago has put a damper on his hobby, sculpting. And he has a new project on his plate, the establishment of a rescue foundation for dogs. He currently lives with six rescues – Gwendolina, Hasinto, Toby, Roma, Arab and Romolo, the last one named for the actor who played the priest in Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo, which he has seen more than 100 times.
Asked whether the film is one of his obsessions, along with Cecil Beaton (“so glamorous!”) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, it’s a “super-obsession,” he corrects. “I cannot live without certain flowers, certain dresses, certain books. I am an obsessive person. My life is dedicated to shoes, 24 hours a day. I do nothing else. I’m always evolving, without evolving too much.”
Manolo Blahnik: The Art of Shoes runs from May 16 to Jan. 6, 2019 at Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum.
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