In which Blakey reveals a love for shoes, but attempts to justify this with some intelligent thought.
I remember the first time I read about Manolo Blahnik, and the fact that he creates each of his shoes by hand. It was an article in Time magazine, and a few years before the shoes became the “fifth character” on Sex and the City. (I actually thought the article was to do with 1998′s Ever After, but Cinderella’s glass* slippers were actually created by Salvatore Ferregamo. But I digress.)
I was reminded again of why I like Manolo Blahnik shoes so much (though I have never seen any in real life) when I read the Times article Shoe Man. It describes the shoe creating process of Mr Blahnik: he draws the shoe (“a few deft strokes of his Chinese brush”), creates the personality and story of the woman who wears that shoe, then hand carves the wooden block, before travelling to Italy to work with the shoemakers who will turn this story into reality.
This is what stands out: “As he draws, he gives each shoe a name, a nationality and a personality. Often bourgeois, sometimes fat, frequently from north Africa, the woman whose personality inhabits each shoe in his imagination is as far from the vapid prettiness of most modern fashion models as it is possible to get.”
It made me think about the things we create, and the importance of letting our creations have a personality and a story. But I also realised the importance of not holding onto that story beyond the creative process. Once we reveal our creation, we have to let others invoke their own story around that. Manolo Blahnik may create a shoe for a “often bourgeois, sometimes fat woman”, but the creation enters real life on the feet of wealthy and well heeled ladies, such as Ms SJP.
So really, we have three stories:
- The story that fuels our creative process (a north African plumpish lady).
- The story that drives the marketing of our creation (a hand drawn and hand crafted shoe).
- The story that our creation becomes a part of, over which we relinquish control (the woman who eventually wears the shoe).
Relinquishing control of the story is an important part of the process – it allows a private fancy to become commercially viable. It’s only when we let others create their own narrative with our creations that our products can grow. Facebook began life as a way for University students to keep in touch. Users developed their own story.
*Turns out the slippers were probably made of squirrel fur. The French word “vair” (squirrel fur) was likely misheard as “verre” (glass) and translated as such. Thus are fairytales made.
