Fakes, fame and films

The world's finest shoe designer talks to Luke Leitch about fakes, fame and the decision to make his home in Somerset.

With a casual flourish of his hands, Manolo Blahnik reveals disturbing news: "In the last few days I did, oh, 350 shoes."

This is a Stakhanovite shoe-output statistic to excite all aficionados of the world's finest footwear designer - and simultaneously terrify their bank managers. What's remarkable, too, is that this productivity level is, for Blahnik, practically languid. Not only is he tired - "exhausted!" - from work trips to Hong Kong (to meet retailers) and Milan (to meet suppliers), but he designs, he says, more slowly these days than he used to.

This is not because of his advancing years - "In a year's time I'll be 70. And it makes me happy that Armani is 80 because I'm not going to be retiring!" - but thanks to a consciously fastidious deceleration. "I do and re-do things that I used to do in a flash, because I want to be more perfectionist about these things. Maybe it sounds pompous and pretentious, but that's the way I feel."

That lasciviously scarlet sole-flasher Christian Louboutin is a high-profile parvenu, and Jimmy Choo (long-divorced from Choo himself) has grown into an impressive beast of a global brand. Yet no other women's shoe designer affects women quite so powerfully as Manolo Blahnik. Madonna compared his shoes to sex - then pronounced the shoes superior. And Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman cited them as proof of a higher power's preference for high heels, saying: "If God had wanted us to wear flats he wouldn't have invented Manolo Blahnik." Sex and the City feels dated already, but the shoes that the programme's fetishising made famous continue to look as classically current - and sell as briskly - as they have since Blahnik started designing 40 years ago.

Despite some megabucks offers over those years, Blahnik has never sold his company, so only grants interviews when he wants to. And because his sister Evangelina and niece Kristina oversee the business from its London headquarters, he is free to live where he wants, too. Since he fell in love with Bath, Somerset, on a trip with Grace Coddington in 1983, Blahnik has lived here, in a grand John Eveleigh townhouse, "beautiful, with columns, in a crescent", that's at present swathed in scaffolding. "We are repairing," he says regretfully to explain why we are meeting over tea today in a hotel on the Royal Crescent where he often dines, and is politely accosted for autographs by star-struck American tourists who, to his great chagrin, often call him "Manilla": "Oh! I hate that! Call me Magnolia, anything - but not Manilla!"