Manolo Blahnik

The legendary shoe designer, made even more famous by Sex and the City, Manolo Blahnik was born and raised on a banana plantation in Santa Cruz de la Palma in the Canary Islands to a Czech father and Spanish mother. You would be right in wondering how one learnt so much about designing shoes in the Canary Islands but it was actually Blahnik’s mother who inspired him – she loved shoes so much so that she taught herself how to make her own designs.

Blahnik’s parents wanted him to grow up to become a diplomat and enrolled him to study politics and law at university in Geneva, but he left after one term and switched to architecture and literature. He left for Paris in 1965 to study art and worked at a vintage clothes store called Go. After a few years there, he moved to London where he got a job as a PR and buyer for Joan Burstein who at the time owned the Feathers boutique – she now owns Browns.

Blahnik decided that his next move would be to become a set designer and he took a portfolio of drawings to New York in 1971 with the aim of achieving this. It was there that he was introduced to Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue who told Blahnik to ‘do things. Do accessories. Do shoes.’ Back in London that is exactly what he started to do – he designed an elaborate pair of shoes for Ossie Clark but they were ‘wobbly’ and he resolved to hone his craft and find a skilled manufacturer.

He bought a shoe shop called Zapata (with borrowed money), a boutique on Old Church street in Chelsea for whom he had already been designing shoes and the shop attracted all sorts of glamorous celebrities – Lauren Bacall was even a customer, and British Vogue warned people to ‘employ a sense of humour’ if purchasing his shoes. He broke into the US by designing a collection for Bloomingdales in 1978, which enabled him to open his first US store on Madison Avenue, New York the following year.

In 1974 Blahnik became the first man to appear on the cover of British Vogue, however it wasn’t until the 1980s that his US business really took off – he brought in George Malkemus, a young copywriter to run it, leaving him free to run the European business.

All of Blahniks creations have his signature style and Anna Wintour the editor of Vogue coined the abbreviation ‘Manolos’ of which Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista bought 6 pairs between them in 1991 – for ‘racing between shows’.

In the same year Marge wore a pair in The Simpsons. ‘Luck’ would have it that Princess Diana was wearing Manolos for a party in the Serpentine Gallery on the same night as Prince Charles admitted his affair with Camila Parker Bowles.

All of these events helped catapult Blahnik into the limelight but most people will still admit that it wasn’t until the shoe obsessed Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City came along that we learned about Manolos!