Lunch with the FT: Manolo Blahnik
By Vanessa Friedman
Published: July 3 2009 22:08 | Last updated: July 4 2009 00:48
Milan, during the autumn/winter collections. The city is flooded with fashion people, so no one blinks an eye
at the sight of lamé at 10am or Swarovski crystals at noon. This is
especially true in the Four Seasons Hotel, the mink-lined
home-away-from-home of the power crowd, such as US Vogue editor Anna
Wintour, French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld,
and Vanity Fair’s Michael Roberts. And yet
even here, in the burnished centre of it all, Manolo Blahnik, shoe tsar
and silver-haired dandy
, is able to make an entrance.
“Ms Friedman!” I am in reception, attempting to call his room to say I have arrived, when the 66-year-old Blahnik suddenly materialises next to me, gasping for air and fanning himself with one hand. “Oh, I am so sorry to be late but I ran into Hamish Bowles [Vogue’s European editor at large] on the stairs and then we were” – his hands make little pincing motions – “and it was so hard to get away, but come, come, let us sit. Is that table OK? Let us go there, please.” He guides me over with hand gestures and then pulls out a chair.
Trendwatchers and coolhunters say we are on the verge of a new fashion era: after the “it” brand and the “it” bag, 2009 will mark the age of the “it” shoe. If that is true, if in a time of economic crisis people stop spending money on clothes in favour of accessories that can transform clothes, and if, of all accessories, shoes are the most accessible, then it seems one man should know more about it than any other, and that man is Manolo. (In public conversation he is always Manolo and his shoes are “Manolos”, despite such a highly developed code of personal propriety that he calls everyone by formal terms of address).
Before there was Christian Louboutin, before there was Jimmy Choo or Rupert Sanderson or Nicholas Kirkwood, there was Manolo, inventor of the kitten heel, the man who makes shoes so delicately, decoratively sensual – so caressing of the curve of a foot – that they don’t need a logo or a sole to identify them; they create their own walk. In Sex and the City, the show that did so much to popularise women’s obsession with shoes, Manolos were the original must-haves. Sitting next to him at lunch, I feel I am at ground zero.
The problem is that the conversation keeps floating away. “Are shoes so important?” he asks. “Really? If I was a woman, I would be dressed in the same thing for a month and just change my hat and gloves. Maybe my shoes too; yes, I see what you mean but, really, it’s jewels that change an outfit. And I do love gloves. And I adddore hats. There are toooo many shoes now. I always tell the children,” – Blahnik is an honorary professor at the Royal College of Art and the “children” are his students – “‘Don’t do shoes! Do hats!’ And the shoes are so strange, so vulgar. I hate these platforms that are all over the place today; they are all about grabbing attention. They are suburban! I never do a platform. Well, I did, in the 1970s, but that was a bad experience.”
Manolo, it seems, doesn’t much want to talk about shoes, or women’s relationship to shoes, or even men’s relationship to women’s shoes. It doesn’t interest him. The whole lunch becomes a game where I ask a question and his replies soar and skitter off in entirely opposite directions. This might be irritating, except he performs his verbal sleight of hand with such charm. If Manolo is a giant at shoes, he is a genius at evasion. Or maybe he’s just bored with the questions (yawn, shoes again!), and too polite to admit it.
He has, after all, been at this since 1971, after leaving his childhood home in the Canary Islands, where his Czech father and Spanish mother ran a banana plantation. He made his way to the UK via the University of Geneva and met the photographer Eric Boman, who took him to New York and introduced him to then US Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. She told him to “go make shoes”. Blahnik wanted to be a set designer but he never considered saying no to the legendary (and dictatorial) fashion-ista. Perhaps to compensate for the abandonment of his early theatrical dreams, he has portrayed himself as a character ever since: all the world’s his stage, and speech is a form of performance art; each sentence contains its own peaks and valleys.
Select words, thus, are trilled and stretched, so that it is never just “adore” but “adddddore”, never “detest” but “detessssst”. As Blahnik talks, he often leans in conspiratorially; at other times he will raise his eyebrows three times in quick succession for emphasis, which he knows is funny, and then chase the gesture with a little smile. He also has a deep desire for continuity, or the theatre of the familiar – he has been coming to the Four Seasons in Milan, for example, for the past 30 years and staying in the same room. In New York, he stays at the St Regis.
“I like going to the same places, knowing the people. Tradition! I love these traditional places,” Blahnik says, shaking hands with the waiters in the restaurant of the Four Seasons, all of whom not only know him but also his gastronomic needs: he is allergic to acetic acid, so can’t stomach wine or vinegar. He loves the white bean soup (“it’s divine”) and wants to order it even though it isn’t on the menu. After a brief discussion with the waitress, he settles for vegetable soup, and we return to the subject of shoes.
“I detest this period of fantasy we were in where you had something for three seconds and then you threw it away,” he says, opening his eyes wide in horror. “The last few years have been a nightmare! It’s one thing to have a dream, but this was overkill! I was in Los Angeles last year, because they were giving me that award where they can spit on you and stomp on you. What’s it called? A star on the Walk of Style?” He means the Rodeo Drive Walk of Style, a series of plaques awarded to fashion and style legends that are embedded into a Beverly Hills pavement. “Yes, the Walk of Style. They asked me who I wanted to give me the award: Chloë Sevigny? I said, ‘No, I don’t get her.’ Lucy Liu? Oh, she was divine, I looooove oriental girls. Do you love oriental girls? And she was wearing something by [Givenchy designer] Riccardo Tisci, who is my favourite boy – what were we talking about?”
Blahnik has a tendency to monologue, and will often stop himself and self-reflexively announce – “but I vomit! I vomit” – referring to the torrent of words coming out of his mouth. He pauses only when the free-association he engages in leads him to an upsetting story, such as the one about Yves Saint Laurent’s funeral. (“I will never go to a funeral again, it was too sad. I just don’t get death at all. Yes, it’s there. But I don’t get it.”) He also stops if a friend comes in, such as Karl Lagerfeld, at which point he pops out of his chair to shake hands in delight and then introduces me.
During the entire lunch, Blahnik manages to get only three or four spoonfuls of soup into his mouth and doesn’t touch the bread. I finish my entire salad before he has reached spoonful number two. “I eat a lot of chocolate,” he whispers when I express concern. “I looovve chocolate.” The only question that stumps him is the most basic: “Why shoes?”
“I don’t know,” he says, and shrugs. “I am used to them now.” He peeks at me to see if he can get away with that. “What is this pretty thing?” he says suddenly, grabbing at the broken elastic that is supposed to mark the page in my notebook but instead flops around like a misplaced bookmark. “I like it!”
I raise my eyebrows and remind him that we were discussing shoes. “Shoes?” Blahnik sighs. “I guess ... they have a life of their own,” he ventures. “They are independent. Dresses you have to wear. But I don’t think about it that much.”
Sometimes you get the feeling that Blahnik is too busy imagining his life to examine it. Blahnik is constantly in action, reading or watching television or drawing. At his home in the elegant Georgian city of Bath, in south-west England, he has piles and piles of books and DVDs (every Billy Wilder film, every Ernst Lubitsch), along with every shoe he has ever made. There are about 11,500 of them, hidden behind faux Georgian cabinets in the walls of his house and the house next door, which he bought to contain the overspill. “It’s a shoe mausoleum,” he says gleefully. “No matter how many Diptyque candles I burn, it smells of leather. But I have a mortgage now, I had to have a mortgage for the second house, and I am worried about the mortgage, so I went to my – what do you call them, the ones who gave the mortgage, the umm ... ummmmm ... ”
Bankers?
“Yes! I went to the bankers and they said, ‘But Mr Blahnik you are OK, you have no debt,’ and I said, ‘But I have a mortgage,’ and they told me I was OK but, still, I worry ... Is your house OK? This is what is so difficult about this crisis, I think of the workers in the factories who make my shoes and I worry, I worry. The orders are going down but we need to keep them occupied. I don’t really care if the shoes sell, you know, I don’t. I don’t give a damn. I never wanted this crazy success, except I have a responsibility to these people. Well, it’s OK, they are OK now. We opened a franchise in Dubai that is doing quite well and in Brown Thomas in Ireland, but most of the time the shoes I like best are not the ones that sell anyway.”
He knows what sells because he has 200 points of sale around the world and because he designs every shoe himself. His favourites have been a pair that he made in 1973 for Ossie Clark, which featured cherry blossoms and green suede leaves that twined up the leg; ones with gigantic buttons (“from my button period in the 1980s”); shoes made from coral and pony skin that appeared in an exhibit at the Design Museum in London in 2003; and shoes from this season’s collection called “Toubid”, high-heeled ankle-strap sandals featuring tiers of cut work around the arch of the foot. The ones his customers like best tend to be the court shoes, which he thinks are “very conventional”, especially when they come in “stupid colours like dusty pink. It’s the safe shoe!”
He makes all sorts of heels but says that his favourite height is 3cm, which is a mid-height. (He also does 5cm.) He is currently also very interested in flats because “they are the most difficult shoes to walk in and be divine and gracious – they make you walk like a reindeer. The last time women really knew how to walk well in flats was the 1950s. You can see it in the movies.
“It took me 10 years to really learn how to make a proper shoe and I’ve never made a perfect shoe,” he continues, waving away coffee and cookies. “I’ve come close, but never. I still have to do that. Oh, there is so much to do. I thought I would get more blasé over time but I have just gotten more neurotic. Do you know, I don’t watch the news any more? I refuse to lose my optimism ... ” And again, he is off, far, far from the product, covering the (bunion-ridden, calloused) reality underneath with a surface of silken, satin, sequinned words that roll and tumble over each other, on and on, as the restaurant gradually empties, and he is still talking as he escorts me to the door, and on to the next show.
Vanessa Friedman is the FT’s fashion editor
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La Veranda
Four Seasons Hotel, Milan, Italy
Mozzarella and asparagus salad €26.50
Vegetable soup €20.00
Sparking water €7.50
Still water €7.50
Total €61.50
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Bianca, Britney and other Manolo moments
US Vogue editor Anna Wintour swears by them. In a foreword to the book Manolo Blahnik Drawings, published by Thames & Hudson in May 2003, she writes: “I wear no shoes but his.”
In the same book, Madonna is quoted as saying: “Manolo Blahnik’s shoes are as good as sex ... and they last longer.”
By the 1990s, the word “Manolos” had entered popular culture as shorthand for expensive, stylish shoes. Each season’s styles whet the appetite of stylists and shoe enthusiasts everywhere. Here is a selection of Manolo Blahnik’s best pop culture moments:
An early sighting
To
celebrate her 27th birthday in 1977, Bianca Jagger rode a white horse
to the legendary New York disco hotspot Studio 54, wearing a
full-length dress and bejewelled Manolo Blahnik sandals.
What a Carrie on
Manolos
were thrust into the television limelight when columnist and shoe
addict Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), heroine of the 1998-2004
series Sex and The City, was seen tottering around Manhattan in Blahnik stilettos.
They even formed the narrative basis of two episodes – in “What Goes Around Comes Around” (2000), Bradshaw is mugged for her shoes, while in “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), she is invited to a party where guests are asked to take off their shoes – and someone makes off with her Manolos. In the mugging incident, Bradshaw pleads: “You can take my Fendi baguette, you can take my ring and my watch, but don’t take my Manolo Blahniks.”
In last year’s movie version, a pair of blue satin Manolos plays a central role in the plot as the catalyst that reunites jilted bride Carrie with her fiancé Mr Big.
Pop go the divas
Britney
Spears wears lace-up black patent leather Blahnik sandals with a pink
Swarovski encrusted heel in the video for last year’s comeback single
“Womanizer”. Jennifer Lopez sports Blahnik’s take on the famous
Timberland boot in her video for her 2002 single “Jenny from the
Block”. The same style graces Beyoncé’s feet in the 2003 video for her
song “Bonnie & Clyde”.
Small screen, big presence
Apart from Sex and the City, Manolos have featured in many TV shows, notably in the British comedy Absolutely Fabulous (1992-2004), in which Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) often sports the designer’s shoes, and a 1991 episode of The Simpsons, in which Marge wears a pair of Manolo mules.
In the 2005 TV movie The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s red shoes are Manolos. In US telenovella
Ugly Betty, personal assistant Marc St
James (Michael Urie) hears the ominous footsteps of the editor-in-chief
walking down the corridor. His reaction encapsulates the designer’s
status in the fashion world: “Manolo Blahnik fall 2008! Only one person
in this office knows how to wear those shoes.”
Valentina Zannoni
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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