Manolo Blahnik Blog

Manolo Blahnik, Salvatore Ferragamo — these luscious designer names are a songwriter’s gift, all swooning vowels. A number about branding has a soprano quivering her melisma over “Blahnik”, while her neighbour gives a bluesy croon to “Jimmy Choo”. These are hymns from the temple of consumption, although the soothing voice of persuasion can ratchet up into screeching injunction (“Buy the freaking shoes now!”). Every number offers a chance to dance. In Health & Safety, the performers dress as crash-test dummies, staggering in high heels. The stilted situation nonetheless has a high-motivation sincerity. “Walk tall,” the singers exhort. It’s ridiculous, but the sequence gives you goose bumps. There’s even a tap number in platforms. “It’s joyful, but they’ll be singing about broken metatarsals and bunions,” Thomas grins. “It’s right up my street, these huge, stupid contradictions. I work in discomfort zones.”

Few composers of   Manolo Blahnik shoes in captivity have Thomas’s motor-mouth mordant wit. “I’m the only western composer who spent 10 years on the road doing a double act,” he explains. “It was a gruelling time, beset with failures and disappointments.” But he did learn to gauge audience reaction — if they spit or throw things, it isn’t working — and to wrestle them into submission. “I got quite good at putting hecklers down,” he recalls, “but it was a bit tedious. So I invented this ‘opera device’. I’d say to the crazies, ‘There’s nothing you can say that’s going to hurt me, because I’ve got the weapon. Say what you like.’ I’d bring a singer on, and she’d go ‘You remind me of chemotherapy’, or ‘Do you ever wonder why your friend committed suicide?’ — but sung out beautifully. The point was, people had to be able to understand the lines, so I learnt to write diction. I know exactly where the stress and consonants should land.”

Tourette’s Diva had given Thomas an epiphany about music and language. “You can be saying ‘I hate you’ while the music says ‘I love you’. It was full of bile and anger, and it got huge laughs, but it was weirdly touching.” Thomas worked the same technique in Jerry Springer, where the filthiest songs were frequently the most haunting. He mercilessly probes the grubby corners of our hearts, but makes our failings strangely tender.

For Shoes, he’s assembled a wonderfully oddball team of choreographers. Aletta Collins’s quirky contemporary style sits alongside Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s vaunting modern dance; the deaf choreographer Mark Smith adds idiosyncratic texture with sign language; and Kate Prince will contribute her lyrical hip-hop, showcased in the West End’s Into the Hoods and the hit movie StreetDance 3D. How did they divvy up the numbers? Mear’s plan was to stretch them all. “I’ve given Sidi Larbi the one called Ferragamo, which I would normally do because it’s the big showy

The costumes and footwear promise to be glamorous and idiosyncratic, culminating in a wild finale for a riot of red shoes. And it isn’t merely ballet pumps, heels and taps that grab the spotlight; there are also routines for Ugg boots

Early in season four of Sex and the City, when Carrie Bradshaw is forced to buy her apartment back from her ex-boyfriend, Aidan, she realises she doesn't have enough money to do so, mainly because she has spent so much on shoes -- $40,000 in total. In one of the quips that she was famous for in the series, she says, "I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes."

Carrie's obsession with shoes helped to catapult Jimmy Choo to fame. Jimmy Choo and the rival brand Manolo Blahnik shoes were almost characters in their own right -- shoes inspired a whole Sex and the City episode that was provocatively titled, "A woman's right to shoes."

The Jimmy Choo Story: Power, Profits and the Pursuit of the Perfect Shoe gives an account of the development of Carrie's beloved, wildly expensive shoe brand. It's a story of money-lust, ambition, and what this book calls "the democratisation of luxury", and it ties in with the worldwide boom and bust of the last decade that is so familiar to us. Even now, though, the shoes are pricey. Carrie may have worried about spending $485 on a pair of stilettos in 2003, but in 2010, she could expect to fork out $1,295 (€1,080) for the top shoe in the Choo range.

Two big personalities stand behind the Jimmy Choo story. One is Choo himself, a designer and tradesman from Malaysia; the other is Tamara Mellon, a London fashionista who pumped money into the company. In this account Mellon (nee Yeardye), is the brains behind the outfit. She started out as a London It girl, educated in LA and at a Swiss finishing school before working for Vogue in Hanover Square. Even to begin with she was incredibly wealthy, a daddy's girl, doted on by her father, Tom, who was a self-made man born in London and the son of an Irish nurse; he had made his name in London's Swinging Sixties scene. Tamara met Choo in London in 1995 and after perseverance and an injection of cash from her dad, began collaborating with him.