Manolo Blahnik: The Shoe Sculptor

In 2013, Manolo Blahnik will celebrate 40 years in shoe design — since he came to England from the Canary Islands in the 1970s and was encouraged by the Vogue supremo Diana Vreeland to focus not on fashion but on “extremities.”

As a kickoff to the coming celebrations, Lane Crawford at the IFC Mall in Hong Kong has opened a pop-up store that includes unexpected items like bags, scarves, stationery and luggage, done in collaboration with well-known brands, including Fortnum & Mason for picnic hampers.

A mix of personal objects, inspiration pieces and shoes from the archive collection are displayed in a dedicated space in the store's atrium. Ten vintage styles have even been remade, showing the originality and longevity of black patent ankle-tie sandals, mesh lace-up stiletto booties and designs inspired by artists like Piet Mondrian and Alexander Calder.

The original Manolo Blahnik store, in the Chelsea neighborhood of London, takes Mr. Blahnik back to his beginnings and to characters who marked his career.

“You know, I'm not nostalgic but when you mention Ossie Clark, I get moved and emotional because it was a period that I have fantasized in my head for so long,” the designer says. “I was like a fish in my element because I adored it.”

From the start, Mr. Blahnik had a vision of shoes and how women's feet should look — an idea that ran against the flow of the hefty platform shoes of the 1970s that have recently returned.

“My theme was so light that it was completely against the grain of what was going on,” he says. “I still do that type of vision. I still do the same type of shoes.”

Taking up the colorful pens that sit in boxes on his desk, the designer draws with clear strokes his latest idea: heels made up of a line of round beads, inspired by the shape of a necklace.

Like other shoes with a tongue of raffia fringe or black and white zigzags, there are echoes of the Africa that lay across the water from his childhood home. He also would absorb North African music on the radio owned by his disciplined Czech-born father.

“I started to discover Radio Casablanca — this music, fantasy music — all the songs of an Arab culture of music — and I was hooked to that,” he says.

How are the decorative drawings, meticulously done and delicately colored, transformed into three-dimensional shoes framing the foot?

“Ah! This is a very painful process — sometimes, to get what you want, it's going to be months,” says the designer. “I do the little sketch, which is easy. Sometimes it's very successful, sometimes I flop so I have to change it a million times. The same thing for the heel; it has to be really perfect also.

“I do it all myself. First I do the last, maybe using the same one as last year and changing a thing or two.

“I do the thing in wood, filing the board. Then it has to be done in plastic. Now they do it horribly with computers and things — but I don't work that way.”

How much does his vision of shoes come from inside himself or from childhood, watching his mother with her shoes?

“I always try to analyze this, to know if I was genetically born like that, whether it was something creative in me that happened to be shoes,” says Mr. Blahnik, recalling his mother's elegance and his father's rigidity, demanding tidy clothes and clean nails to sit down at the table.

The first attachment to feet and shoes came from a visit to a Madrid museum, examining sculptures of human feet and animal paws.

“I always like the pose of the animals, much better than the faces,” he says. “I don't know why, don't ask me. This is nothing to do with fetishes or sensuality. I love the expression of the feet.”

The person who put him on his career path was the redoubtable Vreeland, whose American magazine career included encouraging young talent and whose image is framed on his office walls.

He recalls his first trip to New York, when he made his presentation of fashion drawings “obviously in a state of panic and terror and anguish when I got to see her.”

“I went in with a huge pile of imaginary designs for theater, because I wanted to be a theater designer, film designer. I was derailed by Mrs. Vreeland and I was very happy that it happened.”

Why the adoration of high heels?

“You walk differently in high heels — and with a shoe that is uncomfortable you walk badly,” he says. “So the shoe has to be light, beautifully centered, the heel balanced, perfection. And this is what attracts me to somebody who knows how to walk in high heels.”

What other countries have been a source of inspiration? He thinks of Spain, his mother's native country and songs sung by the maids.

Then there is Russia.

“Once I went to the Kremlin 10 years ago and I was completely possessed by Catherine the Great, her lovers, her dresses, her colors. I was totally mesmerized by these things.”

And there is the cinema, the fascination of early Italian movie actresses like Anna Magnani. And, of course, there's Sarah Jessica Parker, whose character in “Sex and the City” made his name across America.

If a history of Manolo Blahnik is written, the writer will know where to look: in the designer's home in Bath, in the western part of England, where he keeps 19,000 pairs of his shoes.