The ebullient, eccentric Manolo Blahnik tells Kate Finnigan about his love of Tina Chow, Charles Dickens, Mary Beard – and Start-rites

Worn by models, actors and royalty for over 40 years, his designs are more than just shoes – they are ‘Manolos’. As a new film sheds light on his extraordinary life, Kate Finnigan went to meet the exuberant Mr Blahnik

LEAVING THE MANOLO BLAHNIK offices in a Georgian terrace north of London’s Oxford Street I have the uneasy feeling I’ve forgotten something. It niggles and eventually dawns. Shoes. We never talked about shoes.

I blame Blahnik. The king of footwear for over 40 years converses – with passion and at speed, his tongue skittering over words with Spanish intonation – about every thing else. He enters the lilac- carpeted, sash-windowed showroom at his office, flapping his lilac double-breasted Anderson & Sheppard suit in a rush of what he calls ‘neurotic energy’ – although he denies he is in any way neurotic. ‘On an everyday level I do not take life seriously,’ he says later. ‘I feed off other people’s energy and exhaust them, possibly. I’m going to give you a headache, I promise.’

Actually, it ’s energising, if dizzying. His lighthanded observations skip decades, epochs, countries, civilisations and generations. Transcribing our conversation later will lead me to confirm that actually we did discuss shoes, and also send me down a Google black hole that takes in an obituary of Lady St Just, the cultural life of ancient Macedonia, Andy Warhol’s retinue, the dancing Dolly Sisters, Bolshevik Czechoslovakia and the gestation period of dogs.

If he has been always like this – and he says he has never changed: ‘I am like this, I can never be other’ – then success of some kind was surely inevitable, by sheer force of personality. A cross between David Niven and Strictly judge Bruno Tonioli, at 74 he is magnetic, eccentric and theatrical, with a resting expression set around eye-popping. Before he even sits down he’s hammed his way through several

A cross between David Niven and Bruno Tonioli, he is magnetic, eccentric and theatrical

double-takes. ‘I look good? You think so? Huh! I’m a mess!’

This is entirely the same version of Blahnik you can discover for yourself, in a documentary released this month called

Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards (he did apparently, although I’m not sure I’d have gone with that title).

Directed by his old friend Michael Roberts, a photographer, illustrator and former fashion director at Vanity Fair and The

New Yorker, it’s a charming film that parades an impressive cast of witnesses to Manolo’s marvellousness – from Anna Wintour, who tells a homely tale of dandling her baby as a lonesome firsttime mother at his Chelsea store back in the 1970s, to the maid at the Four Seasons in Milan, his home-from-home when working in his Italian shoe factories. Joan Bernstein – the owner of Browns fashion store who first employed Blahnik when he came to England, Iman, Rupert Everett, Penelope Tree, Naomi Campbell, Mary Beard, all good friends, also appear. It’s a bit like This Is Your Life, not least when long-term pal John Galliano pops up as a surprise, and could have verged on the cringey if Blahnik didn’t send himself up and wasn’t so fascinating. Blahnik, who was awarded an honorary CBE in 2007, is the

Forrest Gump of footwear, part of every hip scene, in every decade of the second half of the 20th century. In Paris, in 1968, he watched nonplussed as his best friend Paloma Picasso took to the streets in the Paris student riots. In the late ’60s, he moved to London and hung out with Bianca Jagger (he was Jade Jagger’s babysitter), Ossie Clark and David Hockney. He appeared on the cover of British Vogue in January 1974, photographed with Anjelica Huston by David Bailey. ‘Just my profile,’ he

Clockwise from left: with Bianca Jagger in 1987; in New York with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell in 1998; with American Vogue editor Anna Wintour