The Spanish luxury footwear designer Manolo Blahnik has rediscovered his Czech roots by inaugurating the retrospective exhibition “The Art of Footwear” at the Kampa Museum in Prague, which he has dedicated to his father. This museum prides itself on covering artists from Czech exile, including Blahnik, whose family decided to leave Czechoslovakia in the 1930s in the face of harassment from Nazi Germany.
Despite his Czech origin, there are few reminiscences that Blahnik retains of the Central European country of origin. “My father never spoke of Prague. Very little. He only spoke when he was very sad when my grandparents disappeared in the 50s,” he recalled in an interview the artist born 74 years ago in Santa Cruz de la Palma.
His father, says the designer, could not visit the country due to “the occupation of the Bolsheviks until the velvet revolution”, the peaceful transition that occurred at the end of 1989. “Until then he could not come and he was already sick. And his friends were all dead. My family here was one person, Aunt Dana, ‘Danuska’, who has also died,” recalls the artist from the Canary Islands, who put shoes on Diana de Gales on her wedding day.
After studying law in Geneva, Blahnik worked as a photographer, model and shoe artisan, which led him to become a fashion icon, as reflected in the exhibition.
This is the third stop of this retrospective of Blahnik, which has already been at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where it was visited by some 150,000 people, and previously at the Palazzo Morando in Milan, capital of Lombardy, the region where “manolos” are made. “.
Exhibiting in the Czech capital is “almost like a gift that I gave to my father, in memory of my father, because he didn’t come to Prague from 1949 to 1989,” said Blahnik, shoemaker for actress Kate Moss, singer Rihanna and journalist Carrie Bradshaw, star of the series “Sex and the City”, among other celebrities.
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