The Genius of Manolo Blahnik Is on Full Display in The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards

Beautiful shoes are often treated as a frivolity, for obvious reasons. No one ever really needs a pair of jeweled green peau de soie pumps with a 10cm heel. But then, need doesn’t always figure into the vagaries of human desire. Which is why human beings—and not always just women—covet the shoes made by maestro Manolo Blahnik. You may not be able to afford the shoes, but Michael Roberts’ documentary Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards may bring you almost as much delight. Here’s a doc with a spring in its step, intimate without being off-puttingly reverential. Roberts, erstwhile fashion director of Vanity Fair and one of the designer’s longtime friends, opens a window into the life of this very private man, one of those rare beings who is both a profoundly inventive soul and a master craftsman. Blahnik doesn’t just sketch out lovely designs and hand them to someone else who can then figure out how to make them. He knows everything about how a shoe should be made, and how it should be balanced so a woman can actually walk in it. In one of the movie’s most unexpectedly moving scenes, he visits one of his factories in Italy, donning a white coat before striding onto the shop floor. There, he goes to work filing a wooden heel into a miniature Eiffel Tower of perfection. “My joy in life is to spend time in the factories,” he says. “It’s quite sad to say that, but this is the only thing I love, totally l...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Documentary fashion manolo blank manolo: the boy who made shoes for lizards michael roberts movies Source Type: news