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
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
When you discover your life’s work as
a child, it’s more than a career – it’s a calling. Manolo Blahnik
was just a boy on a Canary Islands banana plantation when he sketched his
first elaborately decorated ballet slippers (doodling to get through piano
lessons). “I always loved making shoes,” he says. “I had a little,
horrifically bad-tempered wirehaired fox terrier that I adored. I used to
dress his feet in little bits of lace and ribbon.”
But after studying politics, law,
literature, and architecture, Mr. Blahnik initially pursued a career in
stage and set design. It was the legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland
who saw other possibilities in the intricate, imaginative shoes he
designed for theatrical productions.
