Interview magazine takes a look at the life of legendary shoe designer Manolo Blahnik in a story by Tim Blanks.
Manolo Blahnik glares out a window of his high-rise headquarters just off the King's Road in Chelsea at the Holiday Inn across the way. "If there was an earthquake, I'd be waiting outside for it to collapse," he snaps. The ugliness of the modern world is a constant assault on Blahnik's sensibilities, everything from the "cheap, suburban" interior of his offices ("I can't change anything," he grouses) to the bunch of lilies, newly purchased from a local supermarket, in the reception area. "I'm an old bag—I like old things," he says by way of excuse. He's his mother's son: At the age of 97, with cataracts, she was still sharp enough to notice on the television that ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown's fingernails were chewed and dirty. "Can't anyone in England tell that man to have a manicure?" she wailed.
Still, mounted on a stand in that same reception area is a shoe from the new collection. It is as fine as a fairy's foot, but it's cut from black leather and it restrains the dorsal with corset-laced metal plates. It would make Baron von Sacher-Masoch's pulse race. And then it makes perfect sense that, as much as Blahnik swoons to Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938), he is crazy for Claire Danes in Homeland. If he's an old bag, he's a modern old bag, which is why he is full of praise for new shoe stars such as Nicholas Kirkwood, Charlotte Olympia, and Benoît Méléard. They are Manolo's children. Blahnik himself turned 70 in November, but he dodges time as efficiently as he eludes the efforts of cold, hard print to capture the cadence and cascade of his speech. You'll just have to take on faith the crescendos, the diminuendos, the trills, the over-egging, the effortless syntactical glides from hither to yon. And just pray that Manolo will one day take his show on the road.
Scoot on over to Interview Magazine for the entire interview.
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