Remember the time Sex And The City’s Carrie Bradshaw stumbled into the wrong neighbourhood and was held at gunpoint over a pair of shoes? Or the time she lost a pair of silver open-toe mules at her friend’s baby shower and it became a thing (or a whole episode)? Or that time she found the perfect pair of Mary Janes, something she thought to be an “urban shoe myth”? As any true Sex And The City fan could tell you, it was always a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s carefully constructed creations in question.
Blahnik, whose name has been a cultural reference point for over two decades, is set to become the subject of a new documentary entitled: Manolo (The boy who made shoes for lizards), directed by Michael Roberts. The name itself stems from a short film, also directed by Roberts, released in 2014 that saw Blahnik as a child running through foliage in his home town in the Canary Islands with a mission in mind: to create shoes for the local reptiles out of sweet wrappers. The new film however, is set to be an in-depth portrayal of Blahnik’s life, featuring interviews with the likes of Anna Wintour, Rihanna, Sex And The City author Candace Bushnell, Charlotte Olympia, David Bailey, Iman and Naomi Campbell. In other words a Who’s Who of fashion’s finest, which is unsurprising when looking at Blahnik’s loyal following that ranges from supermodels, singers and actresses, to British aristocracy — Duchess of Cambridge, we’re looking at you.
Roberts’ portrayal of Blahnik promises to be an honest one. “Having known Manolo for over 30 years,” he tells THR, “I can say he is a multifaceted intellectual and romantic whose engaging mind and ingenious work is made for entertaining cinema”.