Manolo Blahnik

I grew up on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands. Myself and my sister Evangelina were educated at home rather than being sent away to school. We had no neighbours apart from my grandfather’s house. It was just bananas, the sea and us... a sort of paradise.We often travelled to Paris and Madrid, where my mother ordered clothes from Balenciaga. She was my first vision of what glamour was supposed to be. Sometimes she improvised and she persuaded the local cobbler to teach her how to make espadrilles from ribbons and laces. I adored watching her making them. I’m sure I acquired my interest in shoes genetically or at least through my fingers, when I was allowed to touch them as they were made.My parents enrolled me at university in Geneva to study politics and law, but after a term, I switched to literature and architecture. They were definitly a better fit, so to speak. In the '60s, I toyed with becoming a stage set designer and took a portfolio of drawings to New York in 1971 in the hope of drumming up work there.Paloma Picasso, whom I knew from Paris, arranged for me to meet Diana Vreeland, the editor of US Vogue. She was truly a terrifying woman. Great- but terrible.When she saw my drawings, she said, “How amusing. Amusing. You can do accessories very well. Why don’t you do that? Go make shoes. Your shoes in these drawings are so amusing.”So I did.I started by designing men’s shoes for Zapata, a boutique on Old Church Street in Chelsea. But I found men’s shoes extremely limiting. I mean what can you do with a proper English brogue? They can’t really be improved upon without introducing the sort of fashion element I really don’t like in men’s clothing.In 1972 Ossie Clark asked me to design the shoes for his next collection. One pair sported red cherries entwined around the ankles and a vertiginous heel – but were structurally perilous.I forgot to put in heels that would support the shoe, when it got hot the heels started to wobble – it was like walking on quicksand!Still, after this, everything sort of took off, and I got a loan to buy out the boutique on church street.In 1978, I created a collection for Bloomingdales and I opened my first US store – on New York’s Madison Avenue – the next year.By then, I had settled upon a successful formula for my collection: About half my designs are controlled fantasy, 15 percent are total madness and the rest are bread-and-butter designs.Throughout the '70s and '80s, I concentrated on mastering the techniques of shoe-making by finding the best possible factories to work with and studying them carefully.I also did many collaborations with fashion designers; Calvin Klein, Isaac Mizrahi and John Galliano notably.I’ve been studying the art of the shoe for over twenty years and by now I know every process. I know how to cut and cut away at the side of the shoe and still make it so that it stays on the foot.I know the secret of toe cleavage, a very important part of the sexuality of the shoe. You must only show the first two cracks.And the heel. Even if it’s twelve centimetres high it still has to feel secure – and that’s a question of balance. That’s why I carve each heel personally myself – on the machine and then by hand with a chisel and file, until it’s exactly right.