Manolo Blahnik on Margot Robbie, Marie Antoinette, fashion and footwear

When Manolo Blahnik was commissioned by Sofia Coppola to design Marie Antoinette’s shoes for the 2006 biopic, it felt like poetic justice. ‘I did have it most of my life — this obsession with [the French queen],’ the designer told Vogue, recounting stories told of the ill-fated monarch by his mother when he was a young boy. Many of these were lifted straight from Stefan Zweig’s 1932 biography, ‘the horrible parts’ of which Blahnik was allegedly spared.

‘The man who made shoes for lizards’ is arguably the most famous shoemaker in history — though Blahnik identifies André Perugia as the ultimate ‘master’ and his inspiration. He has been the subject of biographies, documentaries and coffee table books, his designs a byword for glamour, sex and fashion as objet d’art. Thanks to the cult 1990s TV show, Sex And The City, in which Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist, has a self-confessed fetish for ‘expensive footwear’, Blahnik’s name and renown has percolated way past the confines of his (supremely elegant) stores in Chelsea (Old Church Street), Paris (Galerie Montpensier) and New York (Madison Avenue).

As such, it seems only fitting that he should have designed footwear for history’s most infamous queen. ‘She was an incredible woman,’ Blahnik once said of Marie Antoinette, ‘who was very, very badly [sic] judged as frivolous and stupid.’ The designer has just released a capsule collection of 11 shoes as a tribute to those that he created for the 2006 film, to mark the opening of the Marie Antoinette exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum — to which Blahnik is sole sponsor.

The collection includes a pink silk criss-cross heel with the straps tied into a bow, a T-bar pump with silk rosette and a khaki and fuchsia-pink mule with floral details. Yet of all the shoes he designed for the 2006 film (his favourite, he tells me, is the ‘Antoinetta’), the most iconic is not a heel fit for a queen, but rather a custom, pastel-blue converse wedged into the corner of a shot where Kirsten Dunst tries on one of Blahnik’s more classical designs. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ 1978 hit, Hong Kong Garden, hums in the background.

Besides offering viewers an Easter egg, Coppola intended the converse as a reminder of Marie Antoinette’s character: naive, impetuous and most of all, independent. The anachronism is something of a metonym for the character’s idiosyncrasies and for the very controversies that would ultimately cement her legend: her disregard for courtly ritual, desire to dress herself and move away from the Palace of Versailles to the Petit Trianon, a smaller chateau with a flourishing English garden.

Many articles about the V&A exhibition have identified Marie Antoinette as ‘history’s first influencer’. When I ask Blahnik who, in modern culture, holds an equivalent sway over the people, he suggests the actress Margot Robbie. ‘Through her work in films such as Barbie,’ he says, ‘she has ignited a global fascination with femininity and style in a way that very few can. Like Marie Antoinette, she is able to create conversations about fashion. People don’t just watch what she wears. They follow it.’

Footwear remains one of the most important fashion statements. Shoes are both essential and immediate, protecting our feet and giving us stature while announcing our arrival as they hit the ground with each step. They permeate culture in ways so many of us ignore. Andy Warhol’s nom d’artiste, for instance, stems from an article about shoes that he illustrated for Glamour in 1950. The feature, titled Climbing the Ladder of Success, accidentally credited him as ‘Warhol’ when his last name was ‘Warhola’. The artist went on to produce many more portraits of expensive footwear, several of which can be found today at the Broadwick Hotel in Soho.

For an author, footwear has long been a means of addressing a character’s state of mind. In the final part of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, the titular character removes her sandals to prepare to dance with Herod — a move intended as a symbol of lust. Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe collection is, if not salacious, then a sign of excess; a level of material wealth to which she, a humble journalist, can only aspire. Karma is served twice, once when her strappy sandals are stolen during a mugging ‘somewhere south of Canal Street’ and again when she realises she cannot afford to buy out her ex-boyfriend’s half of the flat because she has accidentally spent ‘forty thousand dollars on shoes’.

Nancy Sinatra may have sung ‘these boots were made for walking’, but more than that, they were made to be gawped at. Besides Marie’s Manolos, what are the most important shoes in silver screen history?

Dorothy’s ruby slippers, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz sold for a record-breaking $28 million (£20 million) at Heritage Auctions last December. They are Hollywood’s most enduring sartorial symbol, the film’s pioneering use of three-strip technicolour cementing their red hue in cinematic legend. By clicking them three times and whispering ‘There’s no place like home’, Dorothy is able to return to Kansas with her dog, Toto, following their stint in the magical land of Oz and their defeat of the Wicked Witch of the West.

The ruby slippers are not the original ‘red shoes’, of course — that would be those in a Hans Christian Andersen tale of the same name, in which a young girl named Karen is forced to dance uncontrollably by a cursed pair of shoes after she disobeys her mother by wearing them to Church.

The glass slipper, Cinderella (1950)

Perhaps the only shoe more famous than Dorothy’s, the glass slipper which Cinderella leaves on the steps when fleeing the ball at midnight determines her fate after the kingdom sets out to find its true proprietor. Justice is served when she produces the other glass slipper to try on (the 1950 Disney adaptation ups the stakes when the wicked stepmother tries to sabotage Cinderella’s chances by tripping up the page entrusted with the first slipper, which smashes into a million pieces). A symbol of hope, perhaps. Or certainly true romance.

The Chanel boots, The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

‘Are those —’ a stunned Emily Blunt stutters when a post-makeover Anne Hathaway swans into the office, her hair immaculate. ‘The Chanel boots?’ the American actress answers. ‘Yeah, yeah they are.’

Every fan of The Devil Wears Prada can quote this passage in their sleep. It is the moment where Hathaway — whose character, Andy, has until now played second fiddle to Blunt’s Emily in the private office modelled off Anna Wintour’s — begins to hint at the reversal of fortune that will ultimately see her go to Paris Fashion Week while Emily recovers from an injury in hospital. The Chanel boot is a (very glamorous) metaphor for Andy’s meteoric rise, although (spoiler alert!) she does eventually crash and burn.

The Nike Cortez, Forrest Gump (1994)

The Nike Cortez sneaker may also have been favoured by George Constanza in Seinfeld, but its most famous on-screen appearance came in 1994 when Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump receives a pair from his love interest, Jenny. Her sudden departure prompts him to run, first to the end of the road and then across America multiple times, gathering followers along the way.

Wearing the Nike Cortez throughout, he goes on ‘for three years, two months, fourteen days and sixteen hours’. It is one of the best-known sequences in cinema history and made an icon of the sneaker, which is still popular today.