In elegant red dress, hair pinned back, her features framed by a pair of statement earrings, Kristina Blahnik is the embodiment of the woman her uncle has been designing shoes for for the past 50 years. Nicole Kidman, Uma Thurman, Princess Kate, Meghan Markle, Rihanna – hardly any other shoe brand has had such a prominent fan base over the decades. Rihanna’s enthusiasm even went so far that there has already been a collaboration between the singer and the shoe couturier twice.
Manolo Blahnik shoes are elegant, imaginative and colourful. And they are expensive. Depending on the model, prices start at 695 euros and sometimes exceed 1000 euros. It is not without reason that Manolo Blahnik is also known as the “King of the Stilettos”, because women can comfortably walk through the evening in his shoes, even with heels of ten centimeters, without having to wear blister plasters the next morning. This is probably due to the fact that Manolo Blahnik still “works” on every single paragraph in the collection so that his “children”, as he calls his shoes, not only meet his demands in terms of aesthetics, but also in terms of comfort. “Our shoes are more than a pair of shoes,” says Kristina Blahnik during a conversation in the “Bayerischer Hof” in Munich. “Manolo’s creativity, his intellect, his cultural knowledge and his curiosity can be found in every model.” Manolo Blahnik’s niece came to the Bavarian capital at the invitation of the luxury online portal Mytheresa, where she was presented at an event about the art of shoemaking and told about the legacy of the family business.
She spent the first six years of her life in Cologne
The London resident has been working on the collections with her uncle since 2009. It was not planned that the trained architect would one day join her uncle’s company. “I was interested in mathematics and design,” says Blahnik, who was born to a German father and a Spanish mother in Cologne and spent the first six years of her life there until she moved to London with her mother. “Both my mother and my uncle have always given me free rein to choose a career. You never put any pressure on me.”
The entry into the shoe business happened in 2009 rather by accident. “My uncle couldn’t fly to Milan to design the collection for personal reasons. So I jumped in at short notice to help.” Kristina Blahnik remembers sitting with the creative team in Italy and they looked at each other and asked, “Can we do this?”
It ended up taking a week longer, but the spring/summer 2010 collection was on its way. “The baptism of fire was passed,” said the German-Spanish woman. After six months, which she had taken as a sabbatical in her architectural office, she had decided to stay in her uncle’s company. “Suddenly everything felt right,” Blahnik recalls. “I knew at that point that I had found my place. It was a bit like coming home.”
The company was her home
No wonder. Even as a child, her life revolved around shoes. When she moved to London, her mother took care of all business matters in her brother’s company as Managing Director. “I practically grew up in a shoe box,” laughs Kristina Blahnik. “As a little girl, I often sat on my uncle’s lap and drew pictures of shoes. After school I did my homework at the company. During the holidays I cleaned up shelves. This was my home. So it was probably fate that I became CEO of the company.”