As it marks its 115th year, WWD celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month 2025 by highlighting some of fashion‘s most influential names from the culture, focusing on one designer each from its lists of The Newsmakers, The Originals and The Legends.

Here, in this interview from 1993, legendary shoe designer and Newsmaker Manolo Blahnik discusses his unyielding energy for the creative process, a lesser-known furniture line and moving forward.

LONDON — Meeting Manolo Blahnik is like walking into a whirlwind. The footwear designer is so energetic and jittery he borders on the hyperactive.

“I can never sit still,” he said, jiggling up and down on a bench in his shop in London. “I always have to move, move, move. It gets very tiring.”

Blahnik crams more action into a day than 10 people. A conversation with the designer is like a roller-coaster ride as ideas spew forth, rising and falling frantically until he can barely control his tongue and has to stop to catch his breath.

He veers from topic to topic faster than a fighter jet; one minute he is discussing shoe design and the next he is talking politics.

Blahnik’s energy and style have made him one of the most creative shoe designers around today. His clients include everyone from the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of York to Madonna, Bianca Jagger and Tina Chow.

Last year he received an award from the British Fashion Council as the nation’s best accessories designer. This month he is due to receive another award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (his second since 1988) and FFANY award.

“It’s very rare, two CFDA awards for the same person,” Blahnik said proudly. “It’s nice, but I do not display them. I keep them in a box hidden away. They are only for myself.”

He has long been known to those who appreciate beautiful well-made shoes, but his fame now is expanding rapidly.

He is even in an advertisement for The Gap, perhaps the ultimate accolade of the ’90s. Blahnik’s face now can be seen smiling down from billboards and buses throughout the U.S. and London.

“I had no idea I was going to be [on] buses,” all over, Blahnik said shocked. “Herb Ritts just called me and said I owed him a favor since he had taken some of my advertising photos. So I posed for him and didn’t think anything about it. And then this. It’s so embarrassing.”

Blahnik is an intriguing combination of bravado and shyness; energy and weariness; humor and melancholy.

Не is also a man obsessed with perfection. “Everything is such poor quality now,” the [then] 47-year-old designer moaned. “There’s so much around. The only way I can do what I want is to stay small and in control. That is the way to be the best.”

The irony is that Blahnik never set out to be a shoe designer.

Born in the Canary Islands of Spanish and Czechoslovakian parents, Blahnik studied literature at the University of Geneva and in 1968 tried to make a name for himself as a theater designer.

He showed his sketches to everyone from Cecil Beaton to Diana Vreeland and each time they focused on his shoe designs.

In 1973 he borrowed money to buy a small flower shop just off King’s Road, which he turned into a shoe boutique and which has been his flagship ever since.

There also is a Blahnik shop in New York, wholesale customers throughout the U.S. and last August a licensed store opened Hong Kong. Another licensed shop is expected to open in Tokyo in April.

“I became a shoe designer because it was the only way I could get known,” Blahnik said shrugging. “Now I am trapped.”

Will he ever give it up? “Maybe. But I will still do it for many, many years because I still have not reached my goal yet on shoes. I don’t believe in time or age, but in 10 years I will be in my late 50s and perhaps then it will be time to look at something else. Who knows?”

Blahnik does two collections a year, about 60 to 70 styles of women’s and men’s shoes a season.

He also does the footwear for the ready-to-wear shows of Bill Blass, Isaac Mizrahi and sometimes Jasper Conran and Liza Bruce in England. “I do it because I like those people and because they ask me,” Blahnik said.

“But my own collection is the main thing. I personally cut 80 or more samples myself, including the lasts,” he said. “See, look at my hands, how rough. It took me seven years to learn how to cut a last. That is why my shoes fit the way they do. But after aIl that work I have to cut about 30 or 40 styles out of the collection. It’s so hard. But I want to keep it very small.”

After he cuts the samples, Blahnik begins the struggle to get them made to his satisfaction. Не works with two factories in Italy — one for sportier styles and high heels and the other for men’s shoes and for boots.

“What is really my trick is that I continue the traditional way of designing shoes, like hand-carving the lasts, but also add modern techniques. For example, we use the most modern way there is to make soles. Otherwise there is no point in continuing. You have to advance all the time.”

Blahnik said his shoes are in such demand because their styles are timeless. “There is nothing retro about my things. They have no specific look. One season my things are very avant garde and the next they are classic. I just keep my style, that’s all.”

For fall he plans to do a whimsical look “because I am so serious now,” little 2-inch heels, riding boots covered in tweed and lots of silks and velvets. “I’ve gone mad with fabrics,” he said, giggling.

He travels continually, jetting to Italy to oversee production to Europe to buy fabrics and other materials and to the U.S. for personal appearances and to check on the wholesale operation.

He uses his visits to New York to catch up on the movies, often seeing up to four in a day. “It’s the only place I have the time. Otherwise it’s work, work, work wherever I am.”

He complains his schedule leaves him little time to relax in his apartment in London, to visit the house in the mountains of Spain he is refurbishing or to travel to his house in Bath, filled with the metal furniture he makes as a hobby. His shops also are decorated with it.

“I always need to keep examining things. I always need a new motivation,” Blahnik said, waving his arms about. “I did the furniture because of that, but I’ve been doing it for 10 years and now I am a bit bored with it.

 “But I will find something else. I always need a challenge.

“It makes me crazy sometimes. My life is such a disaster. I really envy people who can sit still in London. I envy people who can stay in one place for two weeks. But the more composed it gets around me, the more neurotic I become. I just can’t stand to be still, you know?

— Written by James Fallon