“I came yesterday from Chicago,” said Manolo Blahnik from the tiny upstairs landing at Paul Kasmin Gallery, a light-washed West Chelsea gallery space (for New Yorkers: It’s the ex-home of the nightclub Bungalow 8). “Here feels like paradise compared to there—it’s exotic, it’s practically Miami!”
Bitter cold city-hopping notwithstanding, Blahnik’s Fall 2014 collection—presented for the first time on the New York Fashion Week calendar—is cozy and lush, replete with such prompts as filmic nineteenth-century embroideries (“I’m mad about the time—mad about the literature, everything!” the designer said), Aubrey Beardsley swirls, King Philip II’s bed-trim tassels, “a bit of Oscar Wilde,” Etruscan sandals, and much, much more. There’s also a distinct bloodline of craft, edging on couture-like sensibility: One bottine, built of shocking pink satin, with hand-sewn crystals, has to be reformatted for every increase in half-size, so that those crystals can fit.
The lineup’s reina, though, is an elaborate and daring mule, finely threaded in burgundy and emerald hues. “This is the glory of Salamanca,” said Blahnik, proudly. “This is as Spanish as you can get!” The shoe takes its cues from churchgoers’ Sunday best in and around the region.
Blahnik produced four short films with one of his “oldest friends,” Michael Roberts, to accompany the showcase and complement his designs. These range from a mini-biopic of a young Manolo, making foil booties for reptiles in the Canary Islands as a boy, to a full-fledged fantasy story about a Victorian-era ghost, haunting the English countryside.
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