Carrie Bradshaw never really lived – but the newspaper columnist played by Sarah Jessica Parker in the cult series “Sex and the City” has Manolo Blahnik to thank for the rise from successful shoe designer to fashion and pop culture icon. At the end of the 1990s, Carrie made the “Manolos” a coveted object for many women around the world. And Blahnik became the “shoe god”.
That’s what the modest, self-deprecating and talkative man was called not only by his fans, but also by media such as the “Washington Post”. The Spaniard will be 80 on Sunday. But the man, who still works every day, is not thinking regarding retirement. “I’m a workaholic, I’m working non-stop. I can’t understand the thought of retirement,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian in October. “I never tire of creating. Will never stop exploring new things.” And further: “Sitting on the sofa, watching TV and eating potato chips? That sounds like hell.”
Spaniard with Czech roots
Blahnik was born on November 27, 1942 on the Canary Island of La Palma to a Czech immigrant who had fled the Nazis from Prague a few years earlier and a Spaniard. The parents ran a banana plantation there. And there, far away from the glittering fashion metropolises, little Manolo is said to have already made shoes for lizards out of chocolate aluminum foil.
The path seemed to be mapped out early on. Nevertheless, the noble shoemaker assures on his company’s homepage that he only became a shoe designer “by chance”. Why? Well, first he studied law in Geneva. He then went to Paris, attended architecture and literature courses, then the busy young man moved to London at the end of the 1960s, worked there as a photographer and model and reported from the English capital for the Italian edition of “Vogue”. But his dream was to become a stage designer.
“Make shoes!”
Then the aforementioned “coincidence” came into play: when he met Diana Vreeland in New York, he showed the US fashion designer, columnist and scene star his drawings for theatrical costumes. Her “judgment”, as Blahnik said several times: “Young man, concentrate on the extremities. Make shoes!”
The Spaniard didn’t need to be told twice. In 1971 he opened his first shoe shop in London’s hip district of Chelsea – which, thanks to his large circle of friends, soon became the meeting place for the stars and celebrities of “Swinging London”. Models, artists, authors – and also the darling of the fashion scene at the time, Ossie Clark, who soon commissioned him to design a collection for a fashion show. “That might have been the end of my career,” Blahnik knows. At the time, he forgot to reinforce the rubber high heels with steel. The models might hardly walk, almost fell over. “It was a disaster for me, but people applauded enthusiastically.”