Manolo Blahnik: a book and first footwear line

This isn't Blahnik's first book, but it's surely the most eagerly awaited one. Released on September 8th in the US, it is amusing and autobiographical, featuring a wealth of hitherto unpublished pictures.

Authored by Manolo Blahnik, the book is entitled 'Manolo Blahnik: Fleeting Gestures and Obsessions'. It features a collection of hilarious conversations between Blahnik and Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, with film directors Pedro Almodóvar and Sofia Coppola, with Spanish architect Rafael Moneo and with Blahnik's journalist/photographer friend Michael Roberts. 

Seventy-three next November, a career spanning more than 40 years, and including over 30,000 different styles of shoes (currently selling at a starting price of $700 per pair), Blahnik is a designer well-known to women for his shoes featuring sky-high high heels, strings, seams and details that turn them into glamorous icons full of sex appeal.

Born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, the Canary Islands, Spain, Blahnik moved to London early on with his sister Evangeline. He opened his first boutique in the 1970s in Old Church Street, a haunt for regulars such as Bianca Jagger, Marie Helvin and Jerry Hall.

Blahnik hates the fashion world's occasional falsity (and counterfeit copies of his shoes) but he adores the dramatic, absurd happenings that are unique to the industry, such as when he designed Kate Moss' wedding shoes only to have them shipped back to him on the wedding day because they didn't fit with her Galliano dress. "The shoes were re-delivered back to Milan, altered and ready to be worn by the bride, spot on time. I adore the fashion world's follies."

He also hates the word 'modern' but is about to publish his first sports footwear collection for women and men. In this book, Blahnik for the first time lists the people who influenced and supported him as he took his first steps in the fashion industry. Above all, Diana Vreeland, editor in chief of Vogue USA in the 1970s and later fashion industry consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was Vreeland who convinced him to design shoes when he was working as a theatre designer.