It’s a good thing that I checked with Lesley, Manolo Blahník’s trusted press secretary and right-hand woman, that Manolo, sorry
Mr Blahník (she calls him this), isn’t in fact the same Manolo who described John Galliano in his online blog as a “freaky little fashion troll”, or captioned a picture of Hugh Hefner looking old in a Hawaiian shirt with the words “someone call the coroner”. That Manolo, says Lesley, is an impostor, some guy in New York who is obsessed with shoes and uses the pseudonym “Manolo the Shoeblogger” to launch his bitchy sartorial bombs.
Although Lesley is understandably concerned about this issue, when she broke the news I thought it a bit of a shame. Recently a journalist attributed Manolo the Shoeblogger’s thoughts on Gérard Depardieu (“he is slovenly and outwardly repulsive”) to Manolo the Shoemaker, and I had been looking forward to meeting this rare creature, a straight-talking famous person. Besides being sent to re view a local municipal art project, there are few prospects that journalists look forward to less than getting 1,500 words out of an accessories designer.
You have to ring the doorbell to get into the Manolo Blahník boutique on Kings Road. Without Lesley’s precise directions I would never have found it, as there is no sign over the door and from the outside the offices look like a smart private home. When I arrived there was no Mr Blahník and there were only three shoes in sight, besides my own: the two black peep-toed spikes on Lesley’s feet and the unworn stiletto heel that she had artfully placed on the table as if it were an ornament, the obverse of the vase full of white lillies behind it.
I sat there staring at the shoe, thinking how easily the decorative footwear concept could go awry in the wrong hands (Linda Barker’s, say), but then Mr Blahník walked into the room, preceded by the clang and boom of his own voice, and for the next hour and a half it was impossible to have any negative feelings about shoes. “Are you a fashion journalist”? was his first question. No. “Good. Excellent! Manolo the Shoeblogger? Sorry, not me. But it’s very funny, isn’t it? Hilarious!”
How to describe the 62-year-old Blahník? Creative dynamo (a true artist, many would argue), insomniac, indefatigable enthusiast and compulsive conversationalist. Over the years his brown hair has turned bright white and half a dozen wrinkles have lined his tanned, handsome face; otherwise middle-age seems not to have touched him. He talks a lot, and rapidly, as a man in fear of being gagged, with invisible exclamation marks attached to the end of most of his sentences. His conversation swerves all over the place, as does his accent, originating somewhere, I would guess, between Copacabana and Capri but is actually the product of a Spanish mother, a Czech father and a childhood spent in the Canary Islands. He is enthusiastic, confidential, frank — at times inadvisably so — dramatic, theatrical and hysterical, often thumping the table for emphasis.
The director Luchino Visconti, for example, gets three thumps (he is an obsessive cinephile), while trainers gets two: “These hideous trainers! They’re smelly, horrid. Sorry. I keep going on about these modern shoes because they’re not very pretty. I can’t stand these Jesus sandals, all this kind of rubber. Euw! Rubber makes perspiration and is very unhealthy. I don ’t like it. The foot is pushed into this kind of little . . . ugh. Oooh. No, no!”
Notwithstanding the shoe on the table, he abhors pretentiousness and rigorously polices his own conversation for signs of posturing, at one point becoming quite angry with himself for having referred to his shoe “archive” at his home in Bath. What’s wrong with the word archive? “Sounds pretentious. After all, it’s only shoes. It’s stupid. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” Thump.
An article in this month’s Vogue says he is fabulous company, and this is no lie. He is warm, polite (“We haven’t offered you tea or anything? It’s rude!”) and shot through with a streak of barely there melancholy, perhaps the underside of any instinctively passionate nature. Paparazzi shots of Blahník at parties always show him curled up in a corner deep in heart-to-heart territory. But the Vogue piece also says that the text in his new book, Blahník by Boman, a picture book featuring Blahník’s shoes photographed by his old friend Eric Boman, is an “utterly seductive stream of consciousness text”. Blahník himself balks at that description: “When I saw the text to it I thought, ‘This is a dialogue of nonsense. This is vomitarian’.” I cannot disagree, though the pictures — shoes photographed among corncobs and spaghetti strands — are very nice.
Blahník grew up on a banana plantation in the Canaries, where a nanny temporarily drilled him in his now-lapsed Czech. What other languages does he speak? “All of them.” Which ones? (Deep sigh) “Spanish is very rusty. Italian is, like, just work. French is because I went to university. English because I have to. Portuguese because it was easy.” He also speaks, but refuses to read, German because “it’s ridiculous, that language”. For a while he trained as an architect in Paris. There was also a summer job in Malta fulfilling a vicarious dream of his father’s, working as an interpreter for the UN, but all Blahník says about it now is: “God, I was so bored.” Unbeknown to him at the time, his destiny had been decided several years previously. As a boy he made shoes out of tin foil for lizards and his pet monkey.
Why? One of Blahník’s earliest memories is of the espadrilles worn by the women who worked for his mother when he was a small child. A second early memory is of his mother, an avid reader of American Vogue, having the local shoemaker make up her own designs. Blahník particularly remembers a pair in red silk: “She was absolutely mortified for weeks and months because she couldn’t find the right red for her shoes. In the end she found it in Madrid. I inherited my perfectionism from my mother.” After university Blahník thought about becoming a set designer but his true vocation was pointed out to him by Diana Vreeland, of American Vogue. Molly Parkin wore one of his first pairs of shoes — cork-lined patent leather wedges — when she was photographed for a Sunday Times article in the Sixties. Then Vogue called.
Was his father proud of him? “I don’t know. I never had the chance to ask him. He was happy that I was happy.” His mother, now 91, was, needless to say, ecstatic. Hers is the only advice that he now takes seriously.
Blahník’s fanaticism is catching. Recently a very rich lady took him on a tour of her California home — a creepy experience, he says, especially when she showed him the room she had designated to house her Blahníks: every pair was on display in a glass case.
Blahník guesses that he must have created some 10,000 pairs of shoes. He designs them all himself, exquisitely, as we saw in the Design Museum exhibition, and compulsively. Some are flat and round-toed, but most are spiky and pointy and are said to bestow an empowering effect on the wearer, and not only because they cost upwards of £300 a pair.
