If the Shoe Fits

Manolo Blahnik – The unconventional tale of a shoemaker

“Bless the English for their taste for eccentricity, which gave this man a garden in which to bloom.” 

– Eric Boman, photographer

Manolo Blahnik, who has designed some of the most exquisite, fanciful shoes for a discerning clientele including Isabella Blow and Kate Moss as well as fictional characters like cinema’s Marie Antoinette and TV’s Carrie Bradshaw, is known for his rarefied, singular aesthetic. Perhaps that individuality comes from growing up on an island, which was, he says in a 2017 documentary, both “heaven” and “cut off from the world.” 

Blahnik was born to a Spanish mother and a Czech father on Santa Cruz de la Palma, the Spanish island belonging to the Canary Isles near Morocco. He grew up on a banana plantation belonging to his mother’s family, surrounded by palm trees, mountains, and the sea. Life was remarkably formal in the 1940s, including servants and an active social and cultural life. Fastidiousness in a person and in dress was instilled at an early age and has remained, not just because of a sense of pride in appearing well presented but also because it would be a discourtesy to others not to do so. 

Orientalia, Manolo Blahnik, 1986

Blahnik, by his parents, was expected to be one of the best-behaved, best-dressed children on the island. When they weren’t around, he loved catching lizards and carrying them in his pockets. They were everywhere on the island. He created dresses and shoes for them by wrapping silver-coloured chocolate paper around them, and also made shoes for his dog and pet monkey, while being obsessed with the Ballets Russes at the time (he referred to the animals as Diaghilev and Nijinsky – leading Ballets Russes dancers). It was all part of the fantasy world the young boy was creating. 

His parents were both Anglophiles in many ways, without realising it at the time. They read the Illustrated London News, and his father was obsessed with Winston Churchill’s speeches. A multicultural base – Mediterranean, southern Mediterranean, and British cultural references as well as an informal fusion of Spanish and Slav – would become crucially important to inform a layer of sophisticated knowledge and form Blahnik as a person...

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Written by Barbara Mathews 

Illustration Images are copyright to Manolo Blahnik

Lead: Sensi, 1998, Manolo Blahnik