Man with the heeling touch

"Don't insult me," Manolo Blahnik says. "I don't see myself that way and if others do, that would make me sad." The charge is not one that many would reject so violently — certainly neither of the other two designers who make up the holy trinity of modern footwear, Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin. The charge is that, after four decades of designing shoes for the world's most famous women, Blahnik is himself a celebrity.

Were it not for a certain television show, the man Naomi Campbell calls "the godfather of sole" would have retained a greater anonymity. Bianca Jagger may have worn a pair of his shoes in 1977 and Princess Diana said to own more than 50 pairs but it wasn't until Carrie Bradshaw was mugged for her slingbacks on Sex and the City that Blahnik became a part of the female lexicon.

From a different era

"I never watched the show," the 67-year-old says. "At the time, I just thought it was about these stupid New York girls but then somebody sent me a tape of the mugging episode and I thought it was so funny. Not the fact that the girl was mugged, of course, because I would never want that."

Overhearing our exchange, Blahnik's personal assistant informs us that recently, a young British magazine stylist was robbed for a pair of his shoes. Blahnik looks horrified. "Is that true? That is very upsetting."

In his lilac suit and bow tie, fuchsia suede shoes and fine white hair combed back in an urbane, Mad Men slick, Blahnik is a creature from another era. His mind is light and fanciful and he is eager to please, begging me to rein in the wild tangents that leave him breathless.

When you consider that this same imagination is responsible for the beautiful madness of his designs, it is difficult to resent the disorder of his thought processes. Like his style, his references are resolutely uncontemporary. He hates flights and trains, and right now, is "stuck in a 19th-century period: Everything is inspired by Proust, Tolstoy, Balzac and Flaubert — Madame Bovary ... rushing off to her lover in these shoes."

Back in his Georgian townhouse in Bath, where more than 25,000 pairs of his "stupid shoes" are stored chronologically, he doesn't read newspapers or watch TV, today's celebrity circus being of little interest to him. "It is not the vulgarity of it — vulgarity's OK," he says.

Family business

Princess Diana, he concedes, "was special. She wore my shoes with such grace and had a luminosity I have only seen matched by Julie Christie. Maybe Kate Moss has something of that too, now, because she is funny and beautiful, but, really, the whole celebrity phenomenon is only of importance because it gives you money. If it pays your factory workers and your taxes and it means you can buy books, then I can see the point of it." What drives him now and has always driven him, he insists, is "the satisfaction of seeing the shoes being made".

Even the Rousseauesque range of fabrics he has designed for a Blahnik pop-up shop in Liberty, the World of Manolo, is a "weird sensation" for him. "I have realised that I just can't work for other people. I'm lucky that I have got this little family business which suits me fine."

Blahnik can still remember the beginning of that business — and the first time, in 1972, that he saw a woman wearing his shoes. "It was Talitha Getty, and she was walking down the King's Road in acid-blue shoes with white rubber heels." Later, it emerged that the Sixties' It-girl had bought every pair he had made.

Born and raised on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands to a Czech father and a Spanish mother, Blahnik never planned to become a designer. In retrospect, his footwear fascination was always there. "My mother wore these cheap espadrilles and I remember thinking how fabulously feminine they were, with those ribbons all the way up the leg."

From a hobby to a brand

It wasn't until years later, after studying literature at the University of Geneva and moving to London, where he handled personal relations for Joan Burstein, the founder of Browns, that he found himself idly sketching shoes.

"It was the Sixties and you could feel all this new talent coming through. Around that time, I was introduced to Diana [Vreeland, then editor of US Vogue] and she told me to ‘do shoes'. I couldn't believe how quickly they took off. I had no idea that anything I was doing was that different."

The sketches in his new book, Manolo's New Shoes — 170 illustrations of shoes with serpent laces, cherry ankle straps and Himalayan goat fringes — bear testament to how different that vision still is.

In fact, it is difficult to believe that anything as effervescent could end up supporting a woman's body weight. "I love making things that nobody thought could work but sometimes my employees tell me it is just not possible and I have to give up on an idea."

Compromise, however, doesn't come easily to him. "I'll go with an aluminium heel instead of a titanium one because titanium would be too heavy to walk in but then it won't have the gleam I want."

To be certain that the structure underpinning his designs works, Blahnik has been known to test the shoes himself. "My assistants and I will try out every shoe ourselves, walking up and down the factory floor to make sure there are no blisters." Blahnik says it is a fallacy to suggest that women can and should learn to walk in high heels. "A good shoe should have balance, so you shouldn't have to struggle to get it right."

Giving women the rhythm

"It is the height that gives women that rhythm, when they walk — and that is what men love most." Reports that men "don't notice women in high heels" are erroneous, he maintains. "Anyone who says that must be out of his mind: The first thing men look at are a woman's legs and there is nothing more flattering than high heels. The male reaction to heels is half normal and half perversion but some men tell me I have saved their marriage."

There is something appealing, he feels, about women in high heels. "Perhaps it is because it makes them lighter. What I don't like is tiny girls in high heels." Does he accept the feminist view that high heels are a modern form of corsetry? "I think it is such a strange, prehistoric idea that you have to suffer to be beautiful. Surely, we are more evolved and we know now that it is all nonsense. Anyway," he laughs, "I have seen plenty of feminists in New York wearing my heels."

The flats you might assume feminists would prefer aren't, oddly, offensive to Blahnik. "Trainers are my pet hate because of the flat-footed way they make women walk and I think it can be difficult to walk elegantly in flats but there are far uglier shoes. The only shoes I like right now are by Lee [Alexander] McQueen, Azzedine Alaia and Yves Saint Laurent — but others are making horrors."

Influencing generations

Like Yves Saint Laurent, whom he remembers fondly, Blahnik is outraged by the concept that what he does is art. "I don't consider it ‘art' for one minute. But I don't know what art is any more." A perk of never following fashion is that he never finds his work "demode".

"I don't want to sound like a pompous old man but when I look at some of the shoes being designed by students now, I sometimes think. ‘God, I'm still influencing shoes, 30 years on!'" Financial and creative success aside, Blahnik still has one thing left to wish for.

"One day, I want to design the perfect shoe — and I think I will. I just need a few more years."