"Style was everything at Versailles, and the Dauphine followed fashion and made it too. The cut-away mules that she favoured made no concession to the instep, sliding the foot down into the toe, halfway to a ballerina's en pointe. Walking in them was slow dancing in them was agony and they were remarkably hard to keep on. One was lost in the mud when she descended from a carriage and another was reputedly shed ascending to the scaffold on the last day of her life."
""My mother used to read me Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette, carefully skipping over the more harrowing details of the guillotine, of course," the designer recalls. "From that moment on, she became a lasting source of fascination for me throughout my life. The way she dressed and presented herself was a kind of performance that has stayed with me. She is fashion's first real icon.""
Marie Antoinette adopted extreme fashionable footwear that compressed the foot and emphasized pointed toes, with cut-away mules that slid the foot forward and were difficult to walk in. Dresses were often lifted to show jeweled toes in the venez-y-voir style, and the queen reportedly bought multiple pairs per week while relatives ordered hundreds. Manolo Blahnik grew up on stories of that era and absorbed a fascination with her performance of dress. He studied historical shoes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, drew inspiration for his fantastical designs, and later created many pairs for Sofia Coppola's 2006 film starring Kirsten Dunst.
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
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