Manolo Blahnik Biography
Manuel "Manolo" Blahnik Rodríguez was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, Canary Islands (Spain), in 1942. He is a famous fashion designer, known for his creations of women's shoes. Blahnik grew up on a banana plantation owned by his mother's family. From an early age he showed an early obsession with feet, particularly those of the lizards that populated the gardens of his house. Alone, Manolo fashioned foil wrappers of his chocolate candies into shoes for these unsuspecting reptiles.
His name has become synonymous with women's luxury shoes, however, Blahnik became a shoe designer by accident. While studying art and set design in Paris in 1969, his dear friend Paloma Picasso introduced him to Diana Vreeland, then director of the Met Costume Institute. After seeing Manolo's sketches for "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Vreeland zeroed in on Ippolyta's elegant high-heeled sandal decorated with ivy and cherries, saying, "Young man, stick to the ends and make the shoes !". Blahnik studied informally by visiting the best Italian shoe factories and talking to artisans about their art.
In 1969, Manolo moved to London and, after just a year, opened his first boutique in Old Church Street, Chelsea. In 1971, he created his first shoe for a show by the important British designer of the time, Ossie Clark. Blahnik has always been sophisticated, with a personal style that seems to belong to another era or another time dimension. She designed elegant stilettos and persuaded women to adopt her refined sense of femininity.
In 1983, Blahnik expanded his influence to New York by opening a store on 54th Street. With the help of his friend Anna Wintour, he quickly became the go-to shoe designer on the catwalks, creating collections for designers such as Izaac Mizrahi, Oscar de la Renta and Calvin Klein. In 1990, he won the CFDA and British Fashion Council Accessory Designer of the Year awards.
His regal designs also found space on the big screen in Sofia Coppola's film "Marie Antoinette", which won the Oscar for best costume design in 2007. In the same year, Queen Elizabeth II honored him by giving him the title of Commander of (the Order of) the British Empire (CBE) - Commander of the Order of the British Empire - in recognition of his contribution to British fashion.
Throughout his long career, which spans several decades, Manolo Blahnik has always remained an original creative. In 2015, he published "Fleeting Gestures and Obsessions", a transcript of conversations with icons such as Pedro Almodóvar and Sofia Coppola about his invaluable influences in art, design and literature, accompanied by photos selected from his archive of over 30,000 drawings.
