October 17, 2022 |
Manolo Blahnik is a rare gentleman, one of my favourites, who phones exactly at the agreed time and retains such joy and spark for life that talking to him is like catching Halley’s Comet.
Within moments our conversation has bounced like an excited puppy from Indian filmmaker Mira Nair to designer Georgina Godley (“divine”) to Andre (Leon Talley, of course), to how he overlapped at the University of Geneva with Diane Halfin (now von Fürstenberg) to films he’s watched and books he’s read, to people he admires, such as editor Min Hogg, couturier Bunny Rogers, antiques dealer Christopher Gibb, then over to Sicily via the Queen of Naples and her sister Marie Antoinette and to how “FINALLY!!”, he cries, after two years, he will be able to spend this autumn in the factory with his close team. Nothing – not even punctuation – can slow Manolo Blahnik down.
Manolo Blahnik, both in shoes and the person, has the magic power to make you feel beautiful and fascinating. He has a renaissance mind like no other and believes, “without beauty we cannot survive”. For more than 50 years his shoes have danced to their own beat. Manolos aren’t for staying at home or hiding in – his shoes are social occasions that want to take you out; they want to dance, romance, go to galleries, explore, turn heads, cause chaos and are poetry for your feet. Blahnik chuckles bashfully, “Oh come on, it’s very limiting what you can do with a shoe, but you can give them soul somehow… if you just do that, well… I love that.”
I first met Manolo when I was far too lowly to meet Manolo. As a fashion assistant, I would do call-ins for shoots and send him faxes as others might love letters. At Antonio Berardi’s first show I finally had the chance to ‘interview’ him and, just as his PR was about to properly introduce me, I realised, to my horror, that I was in Doc Martens. As I tried, hopelessly, to hide my feet, I tripped and ended up flying through the air. He very graciously caught me. When I was Anna Harvey’s assistant on Russian Vogue I dove across a field, sacrificing myself, to save a pair from a cowpat. When I got my own first pair – an elegant black satin style called Brizio, with a delicate ‘kiss’ at the ankles as the two straps crossed – that was it. At Galliano’s AW98 ready-to-wear show for Dior at the Carrousel du Louvre, when he saw I had no seat (I hadn’t technically been invited) the ever-chivalrous Blahnik insisted I shared his, as I shared his delirious enthusiasm. We clapped and swooned as the hot pink tweeds flew past, and when Linda Evangelista dropped her earring into the maestro’s hand he gave it to me to treasure. Just as Diana Vreeland said to him “Do shoes!” Manolo turned to me and declared, “Galliano! You have to work with Galliano!” And so, we both did.
But with every season, every new Manolo Blahnik collection, I have come to realise there is only one thing you need to know. What is his favourite new shoe? “Arre,” he says without hesitation of the slim shiny black patent shoe with the square heel, pointed toe and polished buckle. “It’s fetishistic, the buckles, the sex, the women of the time.” He suggests Jeanne Moreau, François Truffaut films, Paris and the bijoux mix of ideas from that time as inspiration, and how he remembers Peggy Roche (the stylist turned editor of French Elle and lover of playwright Françoise Sagan) as he came up with these “pointed things with buckles in shiny patent leather”. The shoe, he says, came from, “all those women and their lovers, it’s Paris back in the day”. Manolo Blahnik doesn’t design in themes – he is horrified at the suggestion – his designs dance between the women that wear the shoes as much as inspire them. “Think Paloma [Picasso], Tina [Chow], think of women in their Saint Laurent Rive Gauche or Azzedine Alaïa…” and all at once the shoe comes to life. He says he thinks of different ideas, different women from different eras, and the drawings just flow on to the page.
For his own collections Blahnik still draws about 300 ideas a season. “So many ideas get killed,” he laments, but he is thankfully never short of new ones. “I want to do my work and that’s all,” he says. “This autumn I will go to my factory [in Milan] no matter what,” he vows, having last been able to go in January 2020 “because of the terrible disease” and has been working via Zoom ever since. But as he says, “you can’t stamp out the beauty,” which leads us back to a dinner when Sofia Coppola asked him to design the shoes for her Marie Antoinette film with costume designer Milena Canonero. Blahnik remembers how she told him to “do what you want, don’t be too academic, don’t dilute the idea’,” he sighs with rapture, “and that is so inspiring.” He created silk taffeta slippers in soft shades that look inspired by both Fragonard perfume and Ladurée macarons.
He’s been at his family home in the Canaries since May, but every cloud – he finds he can focus more away from distraction. “I find it easier here as I have less,” he says. “But I do miss the factory. I am not very sociable, but I miss the shoes, the shoes felt social.” Fifty years in business and Blahnik has still has not lost enthusiasm for what he does. “I love to imagine what people would love to have.”
He’s been at his family home in the Canaries since May, but every cloud – he finds he can focus more away from distraction. “I find it easier here as I have less,” he says. “But I do miss the factory. I am not very sociable, but I miss the shoes, the shoes felt social.” Fifty years in business and Blahnik has still has not lost enthusiasm for what he does. “I love to imagine what people would love to have.”
“The cut out styles were my favourites in this collection,” he says of the shoe bootie and sharp-heeled pump Dalida he sees someone like Paloma Picasso wearing, “in Geneva or going out in Paris”. He also loves a ‘Prussian’ boot, Gurzuf, with its ‘window-like’ panels and would’ve liked to have done a whole collection just exploring that; “ideas capture me like that, and I put it on paper,” he says as if it was this simple. He designs shoes that are friends. There is a boot called Piaggina, inspired by the great fashion editor Anna Piaggi, where the ruffles and collar of the boot curl around the ankle like her exaggerated cuffs, collars and, well, personality. The collection has some tartan tweeds inspired by highland rebels and editorial he remembers styled by Grace Coddington, featuring Linda Evangelista high-kicking and Stella Tennant, who mixed high society with the spirit of punk – as all his references and memories collide.
The brogues in this collection remind me of Galliano and gangsters, Savile Row and spats, Twiggy in Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Boy Friend, which makes sense as Blahnik created the shoes for Galliano’s now legendary 1994 show at São Schlumberger’s eighteenth-century hotel particulier mansion in Paris. He remembers it as if it was yesterday. “I had never seen anything as magical as that show,” he says. “It was a moment beyond, the best ever in 50 years… It was worth doing fashion for.”
Up in the mountains of the Canaries, between the beach and wild gardens, he is just finishing a “beautiful collection… very pretty shoes, it just happened to me one night.” Living with his books, on the island, has really ignited his imagination and helped him find a newness to his approach. Before he would draw with people always around, “so many people,” he says, “but now I am totally free to do what I want – I can just draw and this is what I do and that is wonderful.” It’s very different to the big productions of the Galliano Dior shows he did. “That was tremendous, a golden period – Andre was right when he said, ‘Paris won’t be the same after that’. Then it was a dream, but that doesn’t work anymore. It was pure fantasy… The show on the train [the 1998 Diorient Express]? Genius. I was in a state. The [1997] Parc de Bagatelle – extraordinary. I will never forget Stella [Tennant] in that grey coat in the heat of summer with the huge Maori collar. It was one of the moments of my life.” He was at the heart of an era of couture, decadence and romance.
“It was a dream, beautiful, but also, I don’t want to be just trapped in that period. I am not in the past,” he says firmly. “I want to be in the moment, present, and it’s always the new and the now that excites me. Now I am doing my own thing, I can see palm trees, water in the pool and the mountains behind,” he says of the home where he works with no distraction – only his dogs, his colours, his imagination. Blahnik intends to set up a table up the hillside and just sit and draw. He drew the current AW22 collection two years ago and finished them a year ago, in a very different world, but says, “the pieces have joy, they took me away from everything. When I am working, I forget what I am doing and just do what feels right and these lines jump out and boom!” It’s that process that keeps him drawing and “makes me really happy”.
I can picture him with his colours, and I remind him of the Bottino he drew for me when I left Vogue in October 1999, a patchwork of possibilities that he signed “for your next trip in the fashion industry”. It has hung in a frame above my desk, guiding me, ever since. “I’ve been lucky. We’ve been lucky. We’ve worked with talent, real talent, and that is rare and that is exciting.” His shoes are all that rare talent combined, and that is why you need Manolo Blahnik to keep you on your toes, in every sense.
Photographer Daniel Stier, Fashion Editor Sophia Neophitou. Taken from Issue 69 of 10 Magazine – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – out now. Purchase here.
