Luxury shoemaker Manolo Blahnik has opened a new flagship store in New York at the boutique ( located in a 1923 landmark building) has two individual and contiguous storefronts; one leads into a room containing the women’s collection, the other to the men’s. Connected internally, each space has a distinct decor: Marble and plaster in a classical vein for her; blue lacquer for him, as well as a brass-topped bar bar intended for all clients.
Shoe shopping and smoothies sound like a winning combination. “I created someplace that you could be relaxed,” said Blahnik, who is mad about architecture and designed the new space with his Kristina Blahnik, his niece and company CEO, who is trained in the field; and the interior decorator David Thomas who is responsible for the look of the brand’s Palais Royale shop in Paris.
“I’m so terrified about opening a shop again in New York. I don’t know if this is the right time—but yes! The other night I had a revelation, I said, ‘Why not?’ People are just desperate now to get excited again, and buy. But a different kind of buying; buying things that they think would be necessary, [that are] really well made, [that] are going to last…. Maybe my dream was totally wrong, but I don’t think so.”
Manolo Blahnik new flagship store in New York at Madison Avenue
After 50 years in the business, Blahnik knows how to read his customers; he hopes that in the new store they’ll discover “a certain part of my personality that they don’t know.” Exclusive to the Madison Avenue space will be a small capsule collection, called 717, that is sure to count among the city’s chicest souvenirs. The designer plans the same kind of program for his London boutique. “That’s the only way that I keep my integrity, my soul,” he comments, “because I want to do small things, concentrate on quality and lasting things because there’s too much stuff to be able to see anymore.”
The new collection for fall is a head-turning one despite the extraordinary circumstances under which it was made. “Sometimes it was as if my head was going to explode, but I did the collection…and it’s some of [the] best stuff that I’ve done— things without restraint, completely,” Blahnik says. “I never change very much, I do not follow fashion at all, but somehow I do explode sometimes in the sense of like, why not? And this time I [designed] in that way.” The maximalist approach he took was a response to the restrictions of lockdown. The shoe maker predicts a return to pleasure-seeking and sensuality—“because fashion is sensual in any case.”
Manolo Blahnik new flagship store in New York at Madison Avenue
“New York has been so divine with me,” notes Blahnik, and the store is a way of showing support in return. He first became acquainted with the town in the heady 1970s, then he mingled with Perry Ellis and Diana Vreeland, as well as the Andy Warhol and Halston crowds. Blahnik saw the inside of Studio 54 more than once. “America—especially in New York—is a place of possibilities that you never expect to be able to create somewhere else,” the designer notes. “New York is a modern city, and it always will be.”
