As a boy, Manolo Blahnik was prone to night terrors. As darkness fell in his native La Palma, one of the Canary Islands of Spain, he would wake screaming, overcome by the vision of “a big wolf or big animal eating me up.” To soothe him, his mother, the daughter of banana plantation proprietors, would read him stories.
She selected a unique kind of fairy tale: Stefan Zweig’s 1932 biography of Marie-Antoinette, which describes, with the tone of a sympathetic if haughty patriarch offering supposedly sage advice, her journey from 14-year-old Austrian royal bride to queen of France, to demonized enemy of the people, stripped of her finery and guillotined.
“She was still too young to know that life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows,” Zweig wrote of the teenage bride. Marie Antoinette would, he argued, have been relegated to the footnotes of history had the revolution not come when it did, and if fame, power and legacy weren’t such slippery and arbitrary things.
On a recent summer afternoon, Mr. Blahnik, now one of the most celebrated shoe designers in the world, was sitting in his offices in the Mayfair neighborhood of London, flanked by tiered stands of macaroons and cakes, purchased by an aide to conjure the pastel-laced mood of Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, “Marie Antoinette,” for which Mr. Blahnik designed mules and slippers festooned with ribbons and with edges hand-frayed by the designer himself.
Mr. Blahnik was leafing through a copy of “Marie Antoinette Style,” a new publication from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name, opening on Saturday, which Manolo Blahnik, the company, has sponsored. The V&A display will include shoes Mr. Blahnik designed for Ms. Coppola’s film. In celebration of the opening, he is releasing a capsule collection of new shoes that nod to the queen and his original designs for the film.
“I thought he’s who Marie Antoinette would have ordered her shoes from,” Ms. Coppola said of choosing Mr. Blahnik. She had been impressed by the shoes he had made for the designer John Galliano, which, she said, “felt inspired by 18th-century designs, but modernized.”
Most people who wear Manolo Blahnik shoes called them Manolos, a term popularized by Carrie Bradshaw of “Sex and the City,” who turned Mr. Blahnik from a fashion insider into a pop cultural figure, a shorthand for decadence, expense and forms of self-care. (In one episode, Carrie is mugged at gunpoint specifically for her shoes.) But, to his employees and even friends, he is always Mr. Blahnik: impeccably if sometimes cartoonishly dressed, whimsical, intelligent and enjoyably conspiratorial.
He maintains one of the few thriving independent accessory brands in fashion, and his designs have become synonymous with a sort of empowered femininity — which is no small feat given that stilettoes are one of fashion’s most overt emblems of female constriction and discomfort.
In popular culture, the Manolo woman is full of personality — independent, complex, bold yet endearingly vulnerable. It is a characterization epitomized by Carrie Bradshaw and by the version of Marie Antoinette portrayed in Ms. Coppola’s film. Self-centered yet earnest and iconic specifically because of her infamy and her commitment to shopping, partying and lap dogs.
The sponsorship was a no-brainer, Kristina Blahnik, the chief executive of the company and Mr. Blahnik’s niece, explained: “This is such a special moment for Manolo to get as close to Marie Antoinette as he can — to be in a room with the key objects that represent her.” The V&A show will highlight historical artifacts — portraits and furniture, some borrowed from the Palace of Versailles, items of court dress, the queen’s own silk slippers and jewels from her private collection.
One part of the exhibition will focus on contemporary designers, including Vivienne Westwood and Jeremy Scott for Moschino, who have, like Mr. Blahnik, looked to Marie Antoinette in their collections, intrigued by her style and infamy. As Sarah Grant, curator of the exhibition, explained, the queen was the instigator of many modern trends in fashion, including animal print and monograms.
Surveying pages of the V&A catalog, Mr. Blahnik turned the pages with white-gloved hands, as if it itself was a historical artifact. He fretted about inclusions and potential omissions. Jonathan Anderson had made some interesting historically inspired pieces, he noted, referring to early glimpses of women’s wear he will shortly introduce for Dior, including a baby-blue dress in satin with a voluminous skirt.
“The panniers, very Antoinette,” he said.
To Mr. Blahnik, a true Marie Antoinette piece must not be a mere costume, an overt rip-off, but a genuine embodiment of the sensibility of the queen. “A spirit, that is what you have to do,” he said.
Throughout his upbringing, Mr. Blahnik was a voracious reader and dreamer. He would wait, humming with anticipation, for copies of Life magazine or Vogue to cross the sea.
“It took three months with a boat to come down to the island,” he said. He was drawn instinctively to things that felt “different” — America, England, France. He was ravenous for Harold Lloyd, for any adaptation of Charles Dickens, for anything with Charlie Chaplin and, most of all, for Marie Antoinette.
“There has not been a book about her that I have not read, nor a film that I have not seen,” he wrote in the foreword to the V&A’s publication.
In the late 1950s, when he traveled at 16 or 17 to Geneva for school, the first thing Mr. Blahnik did was take a train to Paris and then straight on to Versailles, where he stood overcome by the excess, the shimmering lights of the Hall of Mirrors, the hypnotic floral silk wallpaper in Marie Antoinette’s bedroom. “I really, totally, couldn’t sleep,” he said, sighing. “Such beauty.” He has made repeated pilgrimages there since.
For Mr. Blahnik, creativity allows for a form of time travel, a way of escaping the present for different worlds or cultures. He lives in Bath, a spa town that became fashionable in the Georgian era, rather than London, preferring the way it creates the sense of living in another era, or at least the fading memory of another time.
Now 82, he is happiest spending his time with his books and his pets. “I’m indulging something extraordinary, which is my dogs,” he said. (He has 16 in total.)
“I live in a reality, but my reality is totally, completely different from anybody I know,” he said. He dislikes technology. He worries about the speed of this moment, the way anything can be purchased, at a click, and as quickly discarded.
Asked if he would have liked to have been at the court of Versailles, he spoke only of a desire to fully sate his imagination: “I would have loved to have seen — not lived, but seen.”
He batted away an idea, proffered by a member of his staff, that he saw himself as Marie Antoinette reincarnated, but when this reporter complimented his suit, a canary yellow checked design by Anderson & Sheppard, he strayed into escapism.
“I got this before the revolution,” he said, wistfully, before catching his mistake and bursting into laughter. “I meant before Covid,” he said.
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