In 2021, my feet went into mutiny. No longer content to silently endure the torment of the ill-fitting sandals, pinchy boots and clunky platforms that I had been subjecting them to for years, even the slightest chafing or blistering was now met with a “thanks, but no” spasm of discomfort so intense, all pretenses of formality were abandoned for the nearest orthotic sole I could find. I was clearly not the only one whose feet were launching this perambulatory revolt, if the record-high spikes in the sales of Birkenstocks, the 246-year-old German footwear company, were any indication.
But look, even the ancient Macedonian army under Alexander had to learn to make the switch from boots to open-toed sandals when faced with the heat of India, the legendary shoe designer Manolo Blahnik tells me, and in that same tradition, we are nothing but just one more people in a long line of civilizations who’ve abandoned heels for an ugly but comfortable sandal. Blahnik and I are speaking a month after the initial release of his collaboration with Birkenstock, which featured the German brand’s Arizona sandal and Boston clog in rich jewel tones. In his reimagining, the famously crunchy footwear was freed from its former Berkeley philosophy professor associations and went full Petit Trianon, rendered in a decadent fuchsia and lapis blue velvet, with additions of two showy crystal buckles (“I put my little touches on it”). To absolutely no one’s surprise—except perhaps Blahnik’s own—the collection sold out in less than half a day. “We sold out in twelve hours! All the shopping sites in New York, Tokyo—can you believe?” he declares with uncontained glee, speaking to me from his mother’s home in the Canary Islands, apologizing for the flimsy connection because a brief volcanic eruption has disrupted all the phone lines on the island. (I can, in fact believe, as both Blahnik and Birkenstock loyalists are rather bloodthirsty shoppers when it comes to acquiring the objects of their worship). Items from that first drop are now listed on resale sites for upwards of double their list price. “I was ambiguous about this, you know,” he continues, growing pensive, “But now I am totally completely in a different mind, because the young people who bought them, they got into my shoes! I am very happy. Birkenstock has made a new audience for me, of people who are 19 or 20!”
Blahnik’s first brush with the German sandal was when he was studying politics and law at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, where summers can get stiflingly hot, and where he saw his Nordic classmates parading around in these orthopedic contraptions. Fascinated and also a little repulsed, he acquired himself a pair and since then has maintained a love-hate-and-love-again fondness towards them (a 2000 New Yorker profile describes the brand as “a word, by the way, that Blahnik can’t bring himself to utter”). But Birkenstocks have long been part of his gardening uniform, and in 2020 he and his niece and CEO Kristina both featured in a Birkenstock campaign. The next phase of the collaboration, launching June 23, is a bit more restrained, but no less eccentric, featuring the Boston clog in black and white, polka-dotted, calf hair and the Arizona rendered in vegetal PVC, an homage to Blahnik’s own archives of experimenting with the material in the 1970s. (“It doesn’t make you sweaty!”)
It can often feel that our era of fashion is one in which clothes are no longer clothes; everything is an unfunny meta-commentary on itself or a joyless money-grab in the literal Metaverse. But Blahnik, in his unadulterated pursuit of tangible beauty and delight, is a purist even in the hedonism he purveys. He is at heart a maker and a tinkerer (“I just love it to death and up to my last minute, I’ll be doing shoes”) and fanatic in his scientific worship of feet, the hardest-working human extremity. Isolated in his home in the Canary Islands, he has been working in solitude for two years, giving instructions over zoom for his new store on Madison Avenue that he hasn’t even seen in person yet. He abhors sneakers (“What I do not like are those trainers that cost a fortune and look like furniture!”) but he loves sandals. Oh, if there is one thing that Manolo Blahnik adores, they are sandals. Grecian sandals, Roman sandals, Indian leather chappals, sandals from Capri, fisherman sandals, Biblical sandals. His name may be synonymous with the elegantly pointy, fang-like heels that cemented his place in the pop-cultural canon of the 2000s, but his heart belongs to sandals and all their erotic promise, which I will confess I had never considered until hearing him erupt with ebullience while describing the glance of a beautiful foot peeking through leather bindings.
