Manolo Blahnik | The New York Observer

Suddenly Substantive: Does Obama Era Mean No More Blahniks?

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:41:28 -0500

Wake up, girls! This is the dawning of a new era. It’s time to get serious. The age of Obama has no place for superficial broads who spend all day ironing their hair, blowing their credit on status handbags and coveting bunion-mangling shoes.

In the super-earnest, cash-strapped America of today, you can no longer define yourself by a flashy purse or the number of Louboutin porno pumps in your...

Sarah Michelle Gellar On B.F.F. Manolo Blahnik, Superficial Dreams

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:35:26 -0500

Sarah Michelle Gellar met her bestie, shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, on a rainy Manhattan day at Bergdorf.

In the February issue of Radar, the 30-year-old actress—whose next film, Possession, will be released at the end of February—sets the scene: “One day, a couple friends and I went into Bergdorf just to get out of the rain,” she said, adding: “A man who works there, who I...

Carrie, the Burden

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:34:09 -0500

"The big elephant in the room is ‘Sex and the City,'" said a woman at the Rubin Museum of Art last Wednesday. She was speaking to the photographer Eric Boman, who is a close friend of the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. Mr. Boman had delivered a talk about the still life portraits he's made of Mr. Blahnik's architectural footwear. In them, they are dressed up in everything from African ceremonial jewelry to a...

The Agony of Da Feet! Sexy Shoe-Fixer Flexes

Sun, 25 May 2003 20:00:00 -0400

You crazy little fool! You careened around town in spike heels for years without any regard to the consequences. You had a vague idea that you were damaging your reputation, but you had no idea that you were damaging something far more important: your feet! Let's face it, you were too plastered to register anything much. (Even pain.) Then you sobered up. And now all you're left with is a throbbing hangover and bunions...

Gals, I've Got Foot-Fetish Flu! So Bid Adieu to Jimmy Choo

Sun, 02 Feb 2003 19:00:00 -0500

Don't you think that the urban shoe-aholic-that contemporary chick with the mania for purchasing vast numbers of trampy, strappy shoes and then talking about them ad nauseam-has become a teensy bit of a cliché? This inescapable modern archetype, jump-started by the excesses of ex–Miss Manila Imelda Marcos and subsequently made groovy by actress (and mom!) Sarah Jessica Parker, has totally lost her/its cutesy self-indulgent resonance. As we brace ourselves for the final round of...

Dumb Bows

Sun, 30 Jul 2000 20:00:00 -0400

They're putting bows on clothes again. Bows are alighting everywhere, like locusts: ends of sleeves, tips of shoes, bringing up the rear of a big puffy skirt. It may be "pretty," but it isn't good. Bows belong on presents, not on New York women.

Try to buy a simple black pump these days and bam, a bow hits you in the face. "It's so Audrey Hepburn," is how they try to sell it. Hey, not...

The Cruel Shoe Master of New York

Sun, 07 Nov 1999 19:00:00 -0500

Foxy Brown, the fashionable, tart-tongued rap diva, couldn't walk. She'd bought a pair of $750 snakeskin Manolo Blahnik stilettos with straps that slithered all the way up her calves, making her look like a marriage between a Roman philosopher and Linda Lovelace. "The sexiest, fiercest thing around," she said. But her heels were wobbling and her cramped toes couldn't find anything to hold onto.

Terror struck. So Foxy Brown teetered over to West 55th...

Phyllis Stine Shops for a Scamper Through the English Countryside

Sun, 08 Aug 1999 20:00:00 -0400

July 23. Dear Diary: C'est moi , Phyllis Stine. C'est moi . Remember you read it here first: The Eurostar is not for ladies with heavy baggage. Finalement , am on board and settled down enough to scribble thusly, but what an ordeal! Who knew you can't check your bags at the Gare du Nord? Your bags stay with you! Escalators! There are a few porters, but it takes paperwork to get one, and...

How Even I Became a … Shoe Person !

Sun, 13 Jun 1999 20:00:00 -0400

Some see a wildly expensive feathered sandal and think, 'Why?' I see a pink Prada clog on sale and think, 'Why not?'

Suddenly it's shoe paradise out there. You're walking down Madison Avenue on a torrid day and you see scantily clad ladies, cute pooches, new real estate developments. I see shoes. Shoes I'm thinking of buying, shoes I've already bought, shoes I can't afford, shoes I suddenly believe I can afford after trying them...

A Regular Guy Crashes the Manolo Blahnik Sale

Sun, 16 Aug 1998 20:00:00 -0400

Blowout at Blahnik!

Yeah, it was getting toward the end of the big sale at Manolo Blahnik, the very expensive, shoe boutique at 15 West 55th Street. Twelve hundred pairs were gone at $100 each, but there was still time to snap up alligator boots, hot pink sandals, spike heels, slides, black patent leather pumps–shoes that, only a week or so earlier, had been going for between $445 and $1,500 a pair. Susan Consentino, a...