MANOLO BLAHNIK PRESENTA “FLEETING GESTURES AND OBSESSIONS” EN BARCELONA

 

Manolo Blahnik on misanthropy, minaudières and the "divine" Mary Beard

  

 By Ellie Pithers, senior fashion news & features editor 

5 AUGUST 2015

A couple of days before I was due to interview Manolo Blahnik, a book thumped down on my desk.

Manolo Blahnik: Fleeting Gestures and Obsessions is laughably titled, considering that, at 488 pages, it weighs more than a paving stone. A flick through reveals the usual glossy exemplars that people this genre of coffee-table tome – Kate Moss photographed by Corinne Day, Julie Christie by David Bailey, Bianca Jagger by Cecil Beaton – as well as lots of glorious pictures of Blahnik’s beautiful shoes. Then there is a chapter about Mary Beard, classics professor at the University of Cambridge. 

Beard, 60, is not known for her taste in stilettos, and is instead revered for bringing an Everyman touch to her BBC programmes about the ancient world (and, subsequently, for her courage in speaking out against online trolls who criticised her “witchy” grey hair and un-made-up face). Her appearance, then, among hot pink satin mules trimmed with marabou feather and pompom-embellished court shoes, is unexpected. 

More fool me. Manolo and Mary are firm friends, and have spent many happy hours together discussing the fact that there are more than 82 words in Greek for shoes. “She is my favourite woman in England!” yells Blahnik, when I get him on the phone one July afternoon. “She is a national treasure. Everything I love about England, encapsulated in one divine woman. All that incredible knowledge – oh! I can’t wait to come back so I can have lunch with her.” 

“People say it’s my first collection of bags but really I have been doing them for years, one every season or so,” Blahnik says, with a theatrical sigh. “This is the first time I’ve done six or seven. All those girls in their twenties and thirties who wear my shoes, they said to me, 'We NEED bags’. Well, here they are. Maybe they won’t like them.” He blows a raspberry in self-retort. 

Blahnik knows, of course, that the girls will like them. They’ve liked his designs since he began his shoe business in 1962 at the behest of American Vogue’s then-editor Diana Vreeland, who saw his theatre and movie designs (he is mad about the movies) and encouraged him to switch to shoes. His first shop, a little buzz-for-admittance boutique in Old Church Street in London’s Chelsea, attracted scores of loyal customers: Charlotte Rampling, Lauren Bacall, Bianca Jagger, and the Berenson sisters all dashed around in his flamboyant designs. 

Karlie Kloss in her Manolos on the Cannes red carpet CREDIT: REX

There was less of a dash at an Ossie Clark show, held at the Royal Court theatre in the early Seventies, for which Blahnik had designed a rubber-crepe-soled shoe. “One thing I didn’t know is that the crepe is very soft and I didn’t put a piece of steel inside, so the shoes moved as the models walked,” he recalls. “All these divine girls, walking around, making a real effort not to fall. It was a horrible mistake but everybody loved it. At the end, Cecil Beaton said I had invented a new way of walking! I said, 'Please, earth, eat me.’ Thank God I am still doing shoes.” 

Carrie Bradshaw in her beloved Manolos in Sex and the CityCREDIT: REX

That byword has yet to be compromised: remarkably, Blahnik has held onto his name in the face of rampant luxury conglomerates buying up independent designers, and still designs every shoe himself. “You have to grow, otherwise you die, but I want it kept small,” he harrumphs, when I ask how he has successfully batted away stake-seeking corporations. “I just run away to the factories the whole time. And I am an absolute pain to everybody!” he roars. 

His shoes are still must-haves. Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, is rarely seen in anything other than his nude slingbacks, and Alexandra Shulman, her British counterpart, pronounces the best perk of her job to be the custom-height stilettos he makes especially for her. 

Celebrity patronage is largely one-sided; most modern beauties leave him cold. “I am very disappointed with people. The ones that I like, I like forever. But new generations are very boring for me. They don’t know anything about what I want to talk about” – that currently includes Balzac, whose work he is rereading in the original French. 

He makes an exception for Uma Thurman, who debuted his clutch bag on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in May. “Uma is one of my favourite girls, one of the Isoldas of the world. I saw her the other day at some terrible party, I don’t go to parties often but I went to this one, and she looks good,” he says, in a conspiratorial tone, before wading off topic yet again.

Uma Thurman debuts a Manolo bag at the Cannes Film Festival in May CREDIT: GETTY

“I like to have lunches in London, not dinners, because I fall asleep. But not fashionable places – I went to that Fire place the other day, in Marylebone.” After further questioning, I discover he means The Chiltern Firehouse, a hotel so popular with A-listers that a little commune of paparazzi now inhabits the pavement opposite. “I call it the Fire place because I have been there twice and both times I almost fainted! It’s so hot!”  

           

Manolo Blahnik Tradi shoes, £725

He thinks he’ll be doing shoes 'til he drops. “I don’t like to travel so much. It’s exhausting, and I’m not a spring chicken any more. But the happiest moment in my nasty travels is the factory time. The true enjoyment of doing bags or shoes is talking to the artisans.” 

He predicts, with characteristic charm, that it will be his boundless energy that “kills me in the end.” He squeaks away happily. “But I cannot change!” 

Manolo's egg satin bag CREDIT: MANOLO BLAHNIK

MANOLO ON...

Matching shoes and bags
“Oh, I hate that. No, no, no. I like shocking pink with acid green, perhaps, but I don’t like co-ordinated colours. It’s old-fashioned.” 

His favourite young shoe designer
“I am not often seeing many other people but I like this Charlotte Olympia very much, and Pierre Hardy.” 

A recent source of inspiration
“An exhibition, Defining Beauty, at the British Museum, encapsulated all that I want to think about beauty now. It was the most exquisite things, Roman, Greek, all from the basement of the museum. Absolutely ravishing.”

The most revolutionary piece of footwear ever designed
“An Italian called Perugia designed a pair of spring heels – a spring where the heel should be, made I think in steel. Mesmerising.” 

Advice for young designers
“Just go for it – don’t think about conditions or money or anything – just do it! Go to see the right people, get the right advice. And don’t have fixed ideas from university or school.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/manolo-blahnik-launches-new-bag-collection-stays-independent/