Manolo Blahnik’s life becomes a movie

The man whose name came to epitomise women’s luxury shoes arrives on the big screen.

Iconic Spanish luxury footwear creator Manolo Blahnik is the subject of a soon-to-open film about his life, entitled ‘Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards’. The 89-minute film entwines historic footage along with dramatisations and interviews with the designer and key figures in the fashion industry.

After opening a store in London in the early 1970s, Mr Blahnik worked to have the shoe recognised as an art form, and still designs every pair of the shoes that bear his name. Over time, that name came to represent luxury in women’s shoes, until the noun ‘Manolos’ was born – a word regularly uttered in the ‘Sex and the City’ TV show. The new film shows that Mr Blahnik is still fascinated by footwear – a love that began when, as a boy in the Canary Islands, he caught lizards and fashioned shoes for them from chocolate wrappers.

Other famous shoemakers have also had their lives revealed in film. For example, a 2016 TV mini series explored the growing rivalry between Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, which developed into the founding of the adidas and PUMA sportswear companies.

Publishing Data

This article was originally published on page 4 of the October 2017 issue of SATRA Bulletin.

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