October 16, 2023 |
“I normally look like a complete scruff bag,” says Kristina Blahnik, the CEO of Manolo Blahnik and the niece of the great shoe designer. We are meeting for breakfast the morning after she hosted a menswear event at Beaverbrook House in Surrey, where she presided over a highly competitive egg and spoon race on the hotel lawn and gave a margarita mixing class (to agave or not to agave?) before unveiling the latest collection. She is, of course, immaculately turned out. Elegance runs in the family. Manolo is known for his love of a bespoke pastel suit and is feted as one of the best dressed men in the world. His sister Evangeline (Kristina’s mother) favours equally impeccable tailoring.
Tall and slender, with her dark hair swept off her face, Kristina, is as linear as a David Downton drawing and has the aura of a natural leader. Whip smart with an eye for detail, she studied architecture at Cambridge and had her own practice before joining the family business in 2009, a move that Manolo, who ran the business with Evangeline, wholeheartedly welcomed.
“I couldn’t work with anybody else. Anybody else, you’re kidding me? A huge conglomerate? No way. No way. I cannot work with people I don’t trust,” says the designer over the phone, Zooming in from his drawing table at the family home in the Canaries. One of his nine Labradors is sitting on his foot as we talk. It’s the house he grew up in, his happy place, where he has spent most of the past few years shielding from the pandemic, but this year he plans to travel more, especially to his beloved factory in Italy, where many of his shoes are made and hand-finished by expert craftspeople.
In 2013, Kristina became the CEO, although she has an issue with formal titles. “It’s just not my thing. I know it’s something we have to have but I’d say I’m more of a creative strategist.” Her intent is to harness the cult appeal of Manolo and take the business from a beloved but relatively small brand to a 21st-century contender in the luxury world, with a legacy built to last for hundreds of years. “The skill sets that I learned as an architect are driving me still today,” she says. “It’s that training and the ability to visualise and have a vision.”
One of her recent initiatives was to create a digital archive where the brand’s rich history and the cultural references that her uncle pours into each design can be explored in a series of virtual rooms. “Everything we do, all the newness, has a reference point, because nothing is created out of a vacuum,” she says, talking about plans to spin the digital archive into physical exhibitions that can travel the world. She’s brought international licences and partnership deals back in-house to better control the storytelling and customer experience, and has also created a vertical supply chain with the purchase of the family-owned Italian factory that had been making Manolo’s shoes for 35 years. The owner wanted to retire, she says, “but there wasn’t a third generation that was coming in. And it’s our largest factory.” The workers cried with joy when they heard the Blahniks had bought the company. “It’s given us such an opportunity to really dive deeper and deeper into our supply chain. That transparency is something we’re driving towards.”
It also ensures those artisanal skills – all the hand work that make a pair of Manolos so prized – are not lost. Kristina, with her background in architecture, often uses building analogies. Theirs is a product that takes time and craft to make; it’s not some prefab thrown up for a quick profit, she says. “When it’s mass-produced, it doesn’t radiate character, it doesn’t radiate the energy that’s been put into it.” It’s what makes a pair of Manolos so special, says her uncle. “It’s the quality, the hours those craftspeople spend doing what they do. Sometimes when I’m there working with them, I try to reach perfection – and you can never reach perfection. But I try because I put everything I have into the shoes.”
There’s another quality that every Manolo shoe has: an irresistible elegance of line, faithfully reproduced from the 300 or so drawings Mr Blahnik creates each season. “He’s very prolific,” says Kristina, who is in awe of his work ethic. “When I draw a collection, I don’t think about whether it’s commercial or a difficult material,” he says. The idea is to simply create. After that, he and Kristina edit his sketches, choosing what can best translate from page to reality. “Once he’s done his part, I then take the baton,” she says, working on the designs, materials and product lines and building the whole thing into a finished collection.
Kristina likes to joke that she grew up in a shoebox. She shared a house with her mother and uncle and spent much of her childhood in Manolo’s tiny Knightsbridge boutique. She’d get the bus from school straight there every day and watch Mighty Mouse cartoons on an old portable TV or do her homework in the upstairs stockroom while her mother and uncle were downstairs selling shoes. “I’d put my head round the bannister and just watch them. It felt like our living room.” She was expected to pitch in. Her first job, aged six, was to hoover perfect stripes into the plush carpet, brush the suede shoes and line them up in neat rows ready for the next day.
She still remembers the first pair of Manolos she ever tried on: a bright red patent pair of stilettos that she found in the basement of the shop when she was eight. “They were my size, with an 11-and-a-half-centimetre [4.5 inch] heel, so I’d put them on and wobble around.” When a new collection was delivered from Italy, they would all work into the night unpacking them. “It was a hands-on family affair.”
It still is. As a student, she worked as a sales assistant in the shop to earn extra cash, but there was never any pressure from her mother or uncle to join the business. “I came to it myself. I asked them if they would accept me.” After 10 years running her successful architecture practice she felt burnt out so, in 2009, when her uncle unexpectedly couldn’t visit the factories to oversee production, she took it as a sign. “I said, ‘Let me do this for you.’ And it was just that serendipitous moment. This is it. This is the moment. I need to step in and I can step in. I can do it and I can support the family and be part of it.”
Like her uncle, she has no desire to get into bed with a luxury conglomerate. The problem, she says, is that all too often, shareholders expect unsustainable growth year on year, which leads to short-term decision-making. “You’re doing it for commercial reasons, for financial reasons. You’re not doing it for values-based reasons or something that is going to enhance the journey or the message. No, as soon as you do that, you break that magic, that sphere of protection around what we are, and then as soon as you’ve broken that bubble, of it being a living, breathing little thing, you’ve sold out.”
The family-owned structure of Manolo Blahnik frees her from that. With no shareholders to answer to, or hedge funders looking for a quick return on their investment, she has the luxury of being able to make long-term, strategic decisions that are better for the business. When the natural swing of the economic pendulum goes up or down, she doesn’t panic, “as long as there’s a rational, natural, organic reason for it”. She points out that last year was one of phenomenal post-pandemic growth. This year will be a little quieter but there’s still plenty going on. When she joined the business there was only one boutique. There are now 21 stores, including three new outlets in China, where the brand recently won a 22-year-long trademark dispute.
She’s also investing in America, particularly Florida and the west coast. Within the next five years, she expects to have around 30 global stores, but no more than that. “I’ve always said we’re about optimising, not maximising. That’s the beauty of being an independent. My three luxuries are time, freedom and safety. I want the business and the teams to feel safe. I want to feel safe, rather than waking up and thinking, how are we going to afford to do the next three months? How are we going to be 20 per cent up?”
Having Kristina at his right hand also allows Manolo to feel safe and focus on his creativity. Looking forward to visiting his beloved factories and the next cycle of creation, he says, “I’m going to recharge myself with new ways of working and producing things.” But one thing won’t ever change. “People need to dream a bit, especially when things are bad.” People need Manolo.
Taken from issue 71 of 10 Magazine – FASHION, ICON, DEVOTEE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
MANOLO BLAHNIK: RADIANCE
Collage Artist JAMES STOPFORTH
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
