by Guy Trebay
This is the tale of the little stiletto that could, a shoe that in the long-ago days of the luxury-goods boom scampered to the top of a rarefied heap. It was just a handful of years ago that the name of Manolo Blahnik, a 68-year-old London cobbler born in the Canary Islands, was familiar only to hard-core fashion hunters and residents of ZIP code 10021.
This is the tale of the little stiletto that could, a shoe that in the long-ago days of the luxury-goods boom scampered to the top of a rarefied heap. It was just a handful of years ago that the name of Manolo Blahnik, a 68-year-old London cobbler born in the Canary Islands, was familiar only to hard-core fashion hunters and residents of ZIP code 10021.
Then a funny thing happened: “Sex and the City.”As man-crazy as the character Carrie Bradshaw was on the long-running series, she was just as obsessive about what Vanity Fair once termed every woman’s favorite phallic symbol, shoes. Lust for footwear seldom featured as a continuing television plot line before the show came along. Yet such was the shoe-mania of the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker that, merely by name-checking Manolo Blahnik, she made his a household name.
One sign of the familiarity American women developed with Blahnik’s classically styled shoes — so comfortable, some claimed, you could wear them to scale Everest — was a 2007 survey by Women’s Wear Daily and the trade journal Footwear News. In it, 37 percent of the 2,000 consumers canvassed about their buying habits conceded that they’d willingly bungee-jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in exchange for a lifetime supply of Manolos.
And if they had, they probably would have met Manolo on the way down.
Soon after the 2007 survey appeared, Mr. Blahnik’s name and label took a style dive, his often kittenish designs supplanted by the more aggressive efforts of a new crop of shoemakers, people like Nicholas Kirkwood, Brian Atwood and Christian Louboutin. (...)
Even among those closely associated with the iconic Blahnik shoe there was a sense that the tide had shifted. A time came, Ms. Parker said, “when Manolo wasn’t defining the aesthetic,” when Blade Runner styles took over from smart patent pumps, and wearing Manolos was almost like announcing one had turned in one’s coquette card and started taking style cues from Judge Judy.
Mr. Blahnik, notoriously indifferent to fashion trends, stayed true to an aesthetic that he said was formed in his 1950s boyhood by women like Audrey Hepburn and the ultra-elegant model Dovima, nee Dorothy Juba. “The gimmicky thing I’m not very keen on,” Mr. Blahnik said last week from London. “I’ve never been tempted to do these hideous furniture shoes.”
But fashion, as we all know, is nothing if not fickle; Heidi Klum is merely reporting fact when she notes each week on “Project Runway” that one day you’re in and the next day you’re out. So it should come as no surprise that, suddenly, signs are everywhere that Blahnik is back in style.
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photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
