“I did have it most of my life—this obsession with Marie Antoinette,” Manolo Blahnik confides. It began in childhood, he says, when, growing up in the Canary Islands, his mother read aloud a biography of the queen: picnics, operas, dinners—“another world.” That early enchantment has only intensified over time and, as of this week, it manifests in a capsule of shoes timed to coincide with the Victoria & Albert Museum’s landmark exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style. It is Blahnik at his most deliciously anachronistic: eleven new styles that flirt with the eighteenth century and land squarely in 2025.
Lest we think he’s merely a devoted admirer, Blahnik and Marie go way back. He’s kept her close—reading biographies, seeing every film and exhibition, and trading long conversations with Karl Lagerfeld about the eighteenth century. It’s why, when Sofia Coppola called in 2006 in need of footwear for Marie Antoinette, he could design around forty pairs with instinctive ease—raiding archives at the V&A, the Musée Carnavalet, and the textile houses of Lyon; working up pastels and embroidered satins; even adapting period-appropriate fabrics.
Milena Canonero, the film’s Oscar-winning costume designer, tells Vogue that the decision to enlist him was inevitable. “I was interested to make special shoes for Marie Antoinette’s character, played by Kirsten Dunst. Apart from the period footwear constructed by the theatrical workshop in Rome, Manolo’s input would be fresh, unusual, and significant. I sent him references of 18th-century shoes I liked, the palette I was using for Kirsten, and her foot imprint. The rest was up to Manolo. I loved them all.”
“I even used a silk-embroidered textile I found in London—at Claremont in Chelsea—which they told me was a reproduction of a fabric Marie Antoinette had,” Blahnik says. But that’s not to say his designs didn’t hew to history at all. “On the phone, Sofia said, ‘Don’t be too academic. Do whatever you want,’” he remembers. He did exactly that for the film—and so too for this new capsule collection.
katrina Lawson Johnston
katrina Lawson Johnston
katrina Lawson Johnston
katrina Lawson Johnston
Out now is not just a macaron-hued box of frilled shoes. Yes, there are sugared pastels—powder-puff pinks and almondine blues—but Blahnik also salts the selection with moody, modern jewel tones: cherry, olive with scarlet piping, even a solemn black satin homage to Antoinette’s final walk to the guillotine.
