Manolo's: Ankle Tie Sandal $1,525 Neiman Marcus

Sexy Shoes in the City
By Jennifer Berg

In case your friends Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte haven’t filled you in, fashion mavens have sprung up a good four inches lately. Is it something in the Bergdorf bottled H2O, perhaps? Actually, the reason for this sudden growth spurt has an exotic name that identifies not a chemical in the water but a sizzling shoe designer: Manolo Blahnik. So who is the man behind the (vertiginous) heel?

Raised on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands, young Manolo started his life far from the runways and glitz of the fashion capitals he would eventually rule. His childhood was, Blahnik has said: “Just family, the bananas, and the sea.” But as the swinging sixties rolled in with the tide, the siren song of Europe lured Manolo to bid the bananas farewell. After spending two years as an art student in Paris, the future shoe king found work as a photographer for the Sunday Times and crossed the channel to hobnob with London’s reigning style queens. (His inner circle included iconic fashionistas Jade Jagger and Paloma Picasso.) In the early seventies, when Manolo’s ever ephemeral passion became theatre design, Picasso helped him land an interview with the inimitable Diana Vreeland, then editor-in-chief at Vogue. It was inside the famously red walls of Vreeland’s office that the groundwork for Carrie Bradshaw’s overstuffed shoe closet was laid: “Go make shoes,” Vreeland reportedly said as she glimpsed a fantastical pair of ivy-and cherry-entwined slippers in Blahnik’s costume sketches. Manolo obeyed, returning to London and designing his first shoe collection in 1973.

Perhaps we have Diana to thank, then, for the sleek stilettos that have since become synonymous with style. (It was Blahnik who revived the stiletto in the seventies, when clumpy platforms ruled the runways.) But most would argue that it’s all the man himself, the designer who once said of his lack of formal education in shoe design: “I don’t need training because I’ve got the best taste in the world.” At an average of $550 per pair, the perfect taste that imbues Manolo’s shoes comes at a cost. But as diehard fans that range from the late Princess Diana to Madonna would tell you: these pumps are too precious to pass up. Just ask our favorite fictional columnist-in-the-city: when Carrie encountered a mugger on a gritty Soho side street, she pleaded: “You can take my Fendi baguette, my ring, and my watch. But Please don’t take my Manolo Blahniks!”