“I did have it most of my life—this obsession with Marie Antoinette,” Manolo Blahnik confides. It started in childhood, he says, when, rising up within the Canary Islands, his mom learn aloud a biography of the queen: picnics, operas, dinners—“one other world.” That early enchantment has solely intensified over time and, as of this week, it manifests in a capsule of footwear timed to coincide with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s landmark exhibition, Marie Antoinette Model. It’s Blahnik at his most deliciously anachronistic: eleven new kinds that flirt with the eighteenth century and land squarely in 2025.
Lest we predict he’s merely a loyal admirer, Blahnik and Marie go means again. He’s saved her shut—studying biographies, seeing each movie and exhibition, and buying and selling lengthy conversations with Karl Lagerfeld concerning the eighteenth century. It’s why, when Sofia Coppola referred to as in 2006 in want of footwear for Marie Antoinette, he may design round forty pairs with instinctive ease—raiding archives on the V&A, the Musée Carnavalet, and the textile homes of Lyon; working up pastels and embroidered satins; even adapting period-appropriate materials.
Milena Canonero, the movie’s Oscar-winning costume designer, tells Vogue that the choice to enlist him was inevitable. “I used to be to make particular footwear for Marie Antoinette’s character, performed by Kirsten Dunst. Other than the interval footwear constructed by the theatrical workshop in Rome, Manolo’s enter can be recent, uncommon, and important. I despatched him references of 18th-century footwear I appreciated, the palette I used to be utilizing for Kirsten, and her foot imprint. The remainder was as much as Manolo. I beloved all of them.”
“I even used a silk-embroidered textile I discovered in London—at Claremont in Chelsea—which they informed me was a copy of a cloth Marie Antoinette had,” Blahnik says. However that’s to not say his designs didn’t hew to historical past in any respect. “On the cellphone, Sofia stated, ‘Don’t be too educational. Do no matter you need,’” he remembers. He did precisely that for the movie—and so too for this new capsule assortment.