Smash hit

“Husbands say, ‘Oh I should hate you, Mr Blahník, I should smash your face. But my wife, my wife! When she puts your shoes on she’s another woman. And at night I just tell her, put them on!’ It’s so intimate, I get embarrassed. Sometimes it’s too much for me.”

I read somewhere that Blahník could not imagine himself designing anything but shoes, is this true? “This is not true. There was the shoe horn.” What about something that has nothing to do with shoes? “I started doing men’s shoes but men’s shoes are just . . . boring. They are not exciting. They’re very limiting, don’t you think?

” Any non-shoe related items in your repertoire? “I made a water chicken thing for my mother. Duckis. A paddock! It was built in the beginning of the 20th century, that chicken house. I thought this could be a Byzantine Venetian kind of thing. A chicken fantasia!”

Has he ever considered what would happen if he couldn’t make shoes?“Ah, I’m paralysed or something? Very unhappy. I mean totally. My life would be absolutely . . . I adore making shoes. I adore it. It’s like a game, a passion. It’s not work.”

Is it an obsession? No, he says. The proof is he doesn’t dream about them. Ten minutes later he rounds on himself and exclaims that he must dream about them because why else does he wake up so often with a new design in his head?

In any case, he hasn’t much time to dream. On a good night insomnia allows him five hours’ sleep. His evening routine roughly follows this pattern: “In bed at 11.30, after Newsnight. I read Susan Sontag (thump, thump). I read for about three hours and stay waiting and waiting. I eat sweets or cookies or have a glass of milk. Then I sleep maybe from 4 to 6am, 7am sometimes.”

Perhaps significantly, he sleeps alone, as he has done for 25 years. Is he still celibate?

“Celibate? Super-celibate! When I was younger I wasn’t. When I was younger I had girlfriends but for the past 25 years I haven’t seen anyone and couldn’t care less.” Was it a conscious decision? “No. you’re made like that. Why force yourself?”

“I can’t deal with people very well. I get on with people about day-to-day things. The problem is, I expect too much. I expect people to achieve things. People who are loyal, who say the truth. Old-fashioned values.” So he’s afraid of not getting those things back? “I never asked to get anything back from anyone. I don’t know, I hate to be judgmental, but unfortunately I am. I don’t make them consciously, these judgments, because who the hell are you to judge anybody else?”

Is it a sense of not wanting to inflict himself on other people? “Possibly. But I never think in that sort of way.” Isn’t he lonely? “I don’t know what loneliness is.” And later: “I guess I don’t practise in life what I practise in my work. I love women. Yes! I mean are we talking about what, like, sexually? If the moment is right, yes, why not but I don’t like, um . . . Yes! I try to think about it but don’t have time. I don’t even have the inclination to think about it.”

Blahník has more pressing things to worry about, such as the demise of the fashion designer as artist and the banality of the clothes he sees in the shop windows. “Somebody in the store in America the other day said I was not visible in magazines and it’s simply because every magazine is full of platforms and I refuse to do that. Fashion now is all about money and I don’t care. This is Seventies platforms. I cannot do it again. I don’t like my contemporaries, they’re not interesting. I find it kind of referential.”

He gets really quite cross about this, but switches gear in an instant to talk of happier things: Susan Sontag, the Pushkin Museum in St Petersburg and his beloved shoes. “You know, I painted one by one the scales of a crocodile with a special kind of brush.”

He’s rambling away when says an extraordinary thing: “In fact, my being in shoes is a complete accident!” The innocence of that remark — his entire character points to the fact that he could not, and should not, be doing anything but making beautiful, sculptural shoes — should remind all women how grateful they ought to be that such a talented person exists, insomnia, celibacy and all.

Blahník by Boman: A Photographic Conversation is published by Thames & Hudson on October 24, £48. Available from Times Books First, 0870 1608080

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