Just Shoes
Manolo Blahnik was born in the Canary Islands to a Spanish mother and Czech father, and the direction of his career was set in a single meeting: reviewing his 1971 portfolio, Diana Vreeland told him he should do "shoes, just shoes." London got the result — the Old Church Street shop opened in 1973 and remains the mothership of the most famous name in women's footwear.
He still draws every shoe by hand and carves his own lasts, and the results carry signatures unmistakably his own: the Hangisi's jeweled buckle on satin, the BB pump's perfect plainness, mules descending from his early Ossie Clark collaborations. Production is Italian; the standards, five decades on, are still entirely his.
The Hangisi did what almost no single shoe design manages — it left the fashion pages and entered ordinary conversation. Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw was proposed to while wearing one, and "Manolos" became a common noun in the process, shorthand for a category of shoe rather than a specific brand, the linguistic fate of very few designer names.
The house is still family-owned — his niece Kristina runs the company — and it still sells exactly what Vreeland told him to sell: the shoe as small architecture, frivolity executed with total seriousness, drawn by the same hand that carved the first last more than fifty years ago.
Article references
The houses in this story
- Manolo Blahnik London / Spain origin / Online
Spanish shoe designer — the most famous name in women's luxury footwear. Hangisi pumps and exquisite craftsmanship. Born in the Canary Islands, based in London, but Spanish soul throughout. store page → · open in the atlas →