Manolo Blahnik

Manolo Blahnik was founded in 1970 in London by Spanish-Czech designer Manolo Blahnik, who had moved from the Canary Islands to London in the late 1960s. The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce architecturally-engineered women's high-heel shoes — sculptural metallic-heel construction, the BB iconic pointed-toe pump silhouette, the elaborate hand-applied embellishment — at the level of couture footwear with each shoe hand-designed and hand-prototyped by Blahnik personally before being put into Italian production. The Manolo Blahnik vocabulary settled around several specific shoe shapes: the iconic BB pointed-toe pump (the brand's defining product since the 1990s, in shifting seasonal materials, heel heights, and embellishment treatments), the Hangisi (the satin pointed-toe pump with the iconic crystal-buckle that became culturally famous through Carrie Bradshaw's wedding scene in the Sex and the City film), the Maysale (a t-strap pointed-toe), the Chaos (a high-heel with deliberate-strap construction), and a colour palette that runs from saturated jewel tones (the iconic Blahnik turquoise, magenta, emerald, sapphire) through to neutral nude and black. Production remains entirely in Italy at small workshops in Brindisi and Vigevano. The brand is independent and family-controlled by the Blahnik family (Manolo Blahnik personally and his niece Kristina Blahnik, who is now CEO). Manolo Blahnik operates flagship retail in London (Old Church Street, Chelsea — the historic flagship — and Burlington Arcade), Paris (Avenue Montaigne), Milan, New York (Madison Avenue, the Manolo Blahnik New York flagship at 717 Madison Avenue), Hong Kong, Tokyo, plus international wholesale through Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, Harrods, the major luxury department stores globally, and the substantial Net-a-Porter relationship. Few luxury footwear houses have remained so continuously family-controlled and craft-anchored across more than five decades.