B is for Manolo Blahnik.
With a career spanning more than 25 years, Manolo Blahnik is one of the world's most prominent designers, and is solely responsible for the design and prototype of every one of the thousands of shoes that bear his name.
"My shoes have something other shoes don't – personality."
It's no wonder, then, that he has dominated the shoe industry since setting up his business in the early 1970s – but it perhaps thanks to a stylish and quirky fictional shoe-lover (Carrie Bradshaw – the central character of Sex and the City) that he has become a household name all over the world. Born in the Canary Islands in 1943 to a Czech father and a Spanish mother, and raised on a banana plantation, Blahnik spent his childhood crafting tinfoil shoes for the family cats, and loved watching his mother make espadrilles from ribbon and laces – a skill she persuaded the local cobbler to teach her.
"I'm sure I acquired my interest in shoes genetically, or at least through my fingers when I was allowed to touch them as they were made," he claims.
Hoping that their son would become a diplomat, his parents enrolled him at the University of Geneva to study politics and law, but after one term he switched to literature. After graduating, Blahnik moved on to study art in Paris, then moved to London where he did the odd design job and toyed with the idea of stage set design. In 1971 he took a portfolio of drawings to New York in hopes of finding work, and it was there that he was introduced the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, Diana Vreeland. Having looked at his drawings, Vreeland is famed for saying, "How amusing. Amusing. You can do accessories very well. Why don't you do that? Go make shoes. Your shoes in these drawings are so amusing."
So, after heading back to London, Blahnik began designing vividly coloured versions of the men's shoes he had admired in old movies, but soon moved onto designing women's shoes which allowed him more freedom and creativity. Blahnik's successful formula for his collections is a combination of "occasional avant garde looks for the affluent few", and "good solid looks that will wear forever". Like all truly talented designers, Blahnik has the ability to stamp his work with a distinctive signature style, yet he is also stylistically innovative. In the 1970s, when shoe styling was dominated by platforms, he revived the sleek stiletto heel.
Now not only do his shoes sell all over the world, ranging in price from about $500 to $2500, but Manolo is now also used as a slang word for describing very expensive, very beautiful shoes. As Carrie Bradshaw would say: Fabulous.
By Nikki Webber - Christchurch
