Blahnik, Manolo

▪ 2004

      The strappy, elegant, and sexy stiletto heels handcrafted by Spanish shoe designer Manolo Blahnik—the same signature pricey footwear featured on HBO's TV series Sex and the City and worn by its trendsetting star, Sarah Jessica Parker—were among the three decades of shoe designs featured at a 2003 retrospective on Blahnik at the Design Museum in London; it was Blahnik's first retrospective, and it was the first time that a shoe designer had been featured at the museum.

      Blahnik was born in 1942 in Santa Cruz de la Palma, Canary Islands. His father was Czech and his mother Spanish. He briefly studied law in Geneva but soon began concentrating on literature and architecture. In 1965 he moved to Paris and studied art. After arriving in London in 1968, he later admitted, he spent more time watching movies in Leicester Square's cavernous cinemas than working on his English, his original intention. His social life was frenetic and peopled with those at the centre of high society and fashion. His manner, however, was always rather formal—a result of his proper, disciplined upbringing.

      In 1972 British dress designer Ossie Clark requested that Blahnik, then a fledgling shoe designer (who was encouraged to pursue the craft by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland), produce a capsule collection to accessorize dresses that would appear in his seasonal runway presentation. For Blahnik it was a watershed moment. British Vogue featured his work on the magazine's pages. Soon stylish young women with whom he was friendly were wearing his shoes, and in 1974 Blahnik posed with model Angelica Huston for the cover of British Vogue, becoming the first man to appear on the magazine's cover. He built a retail client base at a funky London boutique, Zapata, on Old Church Street. He later acquired the premises and set up his own independent shoe boutique, which he operated with his sister, Evangeline, with whom he continued to work closely. By 1979 Blahnik had opened another shoe boutique on Madison Avenue in New York City. In 1991 he added a third shop, in Hong Kong.

      Blahnik taught himself to design shoes by trial and error, mastering the craft by targeting high-quality Italian shoe factories and matching their methods with his innate, artful skill. He produced the prototypes for his shoes alone, working without an apprentice, and, like a haute couturier, he sketched his collections. Those sketches were filled with bright colours and great beauty. Biannually they appeared in high-fashion magazines as his seasonal advertising campaigns. In addition to his association with Clark, Blahnik worked closely with a select group of fashion designers, including Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein in the 1980s; Isaac Mizrahi, Oscar de la Renta, and John Galliano in the '90s; and most recently young designer Zac Posen. These associations kept his designs on fashion's cutting edge. For his contribution to fashion, London's Royal College of Arts awarded Blahnik an honorary doctorate in 2001.

Bronwyn Cosgrave

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